Beryl Fletcher

PART ONE: The Music of the Spheres

 

1

 

Some floods are silent, slow moving, tone deaf to the possibility of fugue and counterpoint. Not this one. For weeks, the rain had held a polyphonic conversation on the galvanised iron roofs of the settlement. Sometimes the rain sang a lullaby, but when the wind came roaring up the valley pushing a wall of water before it, the roofs reverberated like a kettle drum. There was talk about the rising level of the river. Abraham announced that they faced the prospect of becoming completely cut off from their supply route. Hannalore was not concerned. Wet or fine, her tasks in the community remained much the same. The only problem was Juno. She hated to be cooped up inside and Hannalore had to devise extra activities in order to keep her apart from the others. 

 

One afternoon, the rain drifted away. At first the change was so slight that Hannalore did not register the fact that a pale sunlight was threading through the thin white trunks of the mahoe that grew in profusion outside the kitchen windows.

 

Juno came to tell her about the return of the light.  ‘I want to go outside,’ she said. 

 

Hannalore took her hand and told her to be quiet. She led Juno into the washhouse. It was set apart from the other buildings in the settlement. They took oilskins from the coat rack and put them on over their knitted tops and long skirts.  They removed their cotton slippers and borrowed two pairs of leather boots from the men’s shoe rack. Hannalore had to tie the laces around the outside of Juno’s boots to stop them from falling off her tiny feet.

 

They crept away into the bush. The sodden branches of trees and ferns hung low with moisture and they had to constantly duck their heads to avoid taking a cold shower. Soon, their head scarves were soaking wet and Hannalore wrung them out and placed them on a manuka bush in the hope that the sun might gain strength in the late afternoon.

 

They heard the river roaring below them before they saw it. Hannalore helped Juno down the steep track to the swimming hole. The flood water had eaten away the shallow banks of the place where in summer the women came to wash their long hair in the cool fresh water.

 

Now, in flood, the once gentle stream was dark and agitated. The weeping willows were half submerged and the swift current tore at their lower branches as if to rip them from the arms of the mother lode.

 

Juno sat on a flat rock at the edge of the water. She began to remove her boots. Hannalore restrained her. ‘No paddling today, too dangerous.’ 

Juno pointed at one of the willow trees. ‘A man down there.’ 

‘What?’

‘A man in the water.’

 

At first Hannalore thought that Juno was playing games; she often saw things in the physical world that existed only in her mind. Hannalore looked more closely. Yes, there was something caught in an eddy at the edge of the water. A willow tree obscured the view. She walked slowly along the edge of the swimming hole being careful not to sink down into the mud.

 

Then she saw it. A man lying on his back, half out of the water, trapped by a fallen branch. One arm was stretched above his head displaying a roughened hand with thickened fingers. She took hold of this hand and it was dead and cold and white.

 

Juno called out. Hannalore could not make out her words. Something about a horse. She sounded frightened. Hannalore ordered her to stay exactly where she was.  

 

All at once the hand moved. It clung to Hannalore’s fingers like a disembodied claw. Whatever this entity was, life still moved within.

 

Hannalore grasped the man beneath his arm pits and began to pull him clear of the fallen branch. She managed to pull him onto the mud at the edge of the water. She turned his head towards her and saw the ugly face of a stranger, a face with a matted beard, purple lips and stained teeth. 

 

She ripped off his worsted underwear and tucked her skirt up into her waistband. She sat astride his naked body and placed her lips on his. She blew the air into his mouth until she saw his lungs shudder. She turned him on his side and watched him disgorge copious amounts of river water and dark oily clumps of something solid. 

 

She became aware that she was under surveillance. Juno silently appeared at her side. Hannalore was about to reprimand her for coming too close when she looked up and saw two men on horseback, partially obscured by the regenerating scrub. She called out to them. ‘Help me, please, help me!’ 

 

One of the men dismounted and climbed down the rough track. It was Abraham. He removed his felt hat and held it by the brim. He ordered her to release her skirt from her waistband and to leave the body alone. It had nothing to do with them. He covered the man’s flaccid genitals with his hat. Juno giggled.

 

‘This innocent child should not be exposed to such sights,’ said Abraham. ‘I will ride into town tomorrow for the constable to come with a konaki to retrieve the body.’ 

 

‘But he is still alive,’ said Hannalore. ‘God in his infinite grace has saved him.’ 

 

2

 

Hannalore threw lumps of fuel into the fire box of the coal range. The room was infused with the smell of roasted potatoes and mutton. Abraham came into the kitchen and ordered the women on cooking duty to prepare barley soup and bread for their unexpected guest and to find him some decent clothes. Then send him on his way.

 

‘No,’ said Hannalore. ‘The poor man is too weak to make his way on foot through the bush. He must stay until he has regained his strength.’

 

There was a hush; everything stopped except for the rhythmic clanking noise Juno was making by hitting an empty saucepan with a stick. Tap! Tap! Tap!

 

Hannalore would not let it go. ‘The man’s horse has been swept away in the river taking his saddle packs with him. He has nothing left.’

 

Tap! Tap! Tap!

 

Hannalore opened the oven door and began to turn the potatoes over with a wooden spurtle. Abraham said for the sake of my sanity would someone please control that child.

 

Tap! Tap! Tap! Hannalore removed the pot and the stick from Juno. The child clicked her tongue and tried to mimic the sound of the stick. Tip! Tip! Tip!

 

Abraham said that the situation was murky. Jimmy and Conrad had been sent to the river to find the drowned man’s horse but after searching for many hours they had failed to find any trace of the beast. It was becoming clear that the situation required further investigation. There had been a suggestion that the man had been sent to spy on them.

 

Tip! Tip! Tip!

 

‘I am a fair man,’ said Abraham, ‘and one who adheres to the sacred principles of Christian justice. The stranger is permitted to stay until he has recovered on the condition that before he leaves there will be a hearing. Hannalore will have every chance to tell us the truth about the drowned man and how it was that she brought him back to life.’

 

He turned and left. Juno began to chant back to life back to life in her copy-cat voice. Hannalore placed a warning finger on her mouth and the child fell silent. The women in the kitchen came out of their collective trance and murmured between themselves. Hannalore turned her back on them and finished attending to the potatoes. The heat of the oven blasted her face.

 

The murmurs became louder and the comments and questions more pointed. Then the old woman Sarah stood up from her stool and clapped her hands. ‘Be silent,’ she said. ‘The food will be spoiled with this idle chatter.’

‘Her shame is written on her body,’ said Augusta. ‘There is no need for words.’

‘In that case,’ said Sarah, ‘let there be an end to it.’  

 

3

 

The trial was brief and to the point. Hannalore denied prior knowledge of Mr Wilfred Cattermole before she saw him washed up on the banks of the swimming hole. She did not understand why she had removed his underclothes. She did not understand why she was able to put the breath back in his body. Someone or something had guided her.

 

Mr Cattermole was seated in front of Hannalore in the meeting room. When he turned his head to look at her, she barely recognised him from the glacial being that had lain beneath her at the swimming hole. He looked relaxed and healthy and his beard was neatly trimmed. He was dressed like the other men; flannel shirt, denim dungarees and a felt hat.

 

Mr Cattermole was not able to explain what he was doing near the river. His memory had gone, flown away like a paper dart, skedaddled. He can remember leaving Piopio on his horse some time ago. After that, it’s a blank. No, he does not know Miss Hannalore Cooper. Never laid eyes on her before. He didn’t even know that this place existed. He would like to know when they had arrived here to take up the land.

 

‘We are not here to answer your questions,’ said Abraham. ‘You are the trespasser, not us. You must leave today and go back to where you belong. Jimmy and Conrad will take you to the boundary of our land.’

‘What was the name of the river that took my horse and almost took me?’

‘Our land has its own name and so does the river,’ said Abraham.

‘By the look of it I reckon it to be a tributary of the Mokau River.’

‘You will not find us on any map.’

 

Mr Cattermole stood up. ‘Don’t bother with an escort. I am well used to the ways of the bush. I can find my way back to Piopio.’

‘Go then,’ said Abraham. ‘There is a package of food and a bed roll outside on the porch. Take them and leave.’

 

Mr Cattermole turned at the door and doffed his hat at the assembly. He gave Hannalore a conspiratorial wink.

 

She was mortified by this unwanted gesture of familiarity.       

 

Worse was to come. Abraham summoned her to the front of the room and instructed her to face her accusers. Did she not understand the gravity of her actions? She had shown disrespect towards the elders since the unfortunate incident by the river. Her arrogance must be reined in.

 

‘I am loath to do this,’ he said, ‘but I have no choice. You will be subject to the punishment of interment for the period of one lunar month beginning next Sabbath when the moon is at its lowest point.’

 

Hannalore could feel her body close down. Her legs shook. She tried to hold her head up high and look them in the eye but none would engage her.

 

Abraham asked the assembly to pray for her soul. Then he read from the book of Samuel from the Old Testament. Saul said unto his servants seek me a woman that hath a familiar spirit… and his servants said to him behold there is a woman that has a familiar spirit at Endor…

 

The felt hats nodded in approval. Abraham put down his bible and took hold of Hannalore’s head. She locked her eyes onto his. She forced herself to stay calm. He will not make me cry, he will not…

 

‘Learn your lesson from the sacred book,’ said Abraham. ‘Only God has the right to bring back the dead. Do not enter the dark and dangerous world of the bone-conjuror even if a king himself begs you to do so.’

 

Hannalore could not speak.

 

Abraham went to the door and ushered in old Sarah. ‘Take her,’ he said. ‘Take her now. You know what to do.’

4

 

All through the night Hannalore sat on her canvas cot next to the open window. She watched the incandescent stars pierce the vast canopy of a sky that deepened from indigo to black. To her, the stars appeared as white hot torches of judgment.

 

Each hour she removed another garment baring more skin to the air until she was almost naked. She was unconcerned that the other women in the dormitory might open their eyes and see her exposed white flesh. The other members of the community had been forbidden to comment upon her bodily states until the period of interment was over and the women obeyed without question. They did not register her nakedness by the flick of an eye. She might as well have been made of gelatine or isinglass.

 

She had not comprehended until now the loss that imposed invisibility could bring. Even Juno had looked through her with a strange floating gaze, empty and unfocussed, as if her flesh had vanished and she no longer had the ability or substance to cast even the thinnest of shadows.

 

The wintry air acknowledged her presence by shrouding her body in an icy cloak that made her shiver. Hannalore welcomed the scourging of her flesh. She could offer no explanation for her ability to bring life back into a drowned body. The elders had tried every trick in their extensive repertoire to force her to tell them the truth. She desperately wanted to please them but to do so would force a moral descent into the sin of lying.

 

She tried to comfort herself by conjuring up a vision of her mother. The sound of Eleanor’s voice was still with her, reciting stories of domestic mishaps that through constant retelling had taken on the power of grand epics but Hannalore could no longer see the outline of her face or remember the colour of her eyes.

 

This fading away of Eleanor’s physical presence was almost complete. All that remained was a blurred glimpse of slender ankles disappearing beneath the uneven hem of a long skirt and the sight of an ear lobe shedding blood when caught in the clasp of a faulty obsidian earring.

 

Hannalore concentrated on the memory of Eleanor’s voice, the way she paused at a climatic moment in her stories, the way she whispered conspiratorially to her audience so that they had to strain their ears in order to hear the crunch line at the end.

 

Hannalore wondered how Eleanor would have told the story of the drowned man and the hand clutching at her like a claw. She tried to visualise her mother taking hold of Mr Cattermole in the cold river water and all at once she saw a clear view of Eleanor’s hands fresh from the rigors of the wash tub; one crushed finger nail on her left index finger; a ragged purple scar on the back of her right hand that in a certain light could look like a dog’s head or a crude map of Australia. 

 

This unexpected recall of her mother’s wounded hands gave Hannalore a sense of comfort. Something that had been lost to her since she was a child had been given back. She closed the window and climbed beneath her grey blanket just before the dawn light began to break out behind the hills.

 

5

 

Sarah was the only woman permitted to speak to Hannalore during the time of interment. She brought food and brief snatches of conversation to Hannalore when the others were working on their assigned tasks. Hannalore did little else except lie on her cot and day dream. When the early morning sky was clear of rain clouds she watched the silhouette of the steep bush clad hills emerge with the coming of a new day. She listened for the roosters to serenade the return of the light. She listened to the restless sheep dogs rattling the doors of their wire cages. She listened to the sound of the wind sighing through the mamaku tree ferns that held their delicate green umbrellas above the regenerating scrub of kanuka and mahoe. 

 

When the wind changed direction and came from the south west it brought cold driving rain that formed rivulets of mud around the buildings. The women brought candles in at night and held them up to the windows so that they could see the depth of the slush outside. Mud was their enemy. Their long skirts became sodden with sticky clay soil as they scampered between the kitchen and dormitory and the children’s house. The pulley in the kitchen ceiling was strung with wet washing and the men complained that their shirts and union suits smelled of mutton chops and stewed tea.

 

When the south westerly blew itself out, fogs crept up from the river and devoured all before it. Not one leaf moved, not one bird sang. One by one the trees melted away. The fog brought a terrible silence outside her prison that emulated the social death within.

 

Without work her sense of time became distorted. The nights were long. After the last candle was extinguished the women who shared this hut with her went to sleep instantly and slept like the dead. It had never occurred to her before that all of them were in a constant state of exhaustion. They worked every minute of the day and beyond unless the candle box was empty and the night too dark to work at their mending.

 

The days were difficult to bear. Sarah brought her two slices of brown bread spread with honey for her breakfast. This had to satisfy her until teatime when she received a cup of water, a bowl of cooked vegetables or soup and another slice of bread.

 

On the sixth day Sarah pinched Hannalore’s upper arms to see if she was fading away. Hannalore said she was but not because of the food. Although her body remained the same her soul was becoming diminished.

 

‘I’m frightened,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I forget where I am. My body lies here but my spirit is sitting up in a tree waiting for me to come outside.’

‘Hush now,’ said Sarah. ‘Eat your potatoes and drink your tea.’

‘But tea has been forbidden to me.’

‘Drink it while it’s still hot.’

Hannalore gulped a mouthful of tea. ‘I wish my mother was here.’

‘You must be careful not to speak of her to the others.’

‘What colour were her eyes? I am forgetting to remember.’

‘Oh,’ said Sarah. ‘I thought this might happen.’

Hannah drank the rest of her tea. ‘If I just had one photograph…’

 

Sarah gathered up the dishes and put them onto a tray. She hid the empty cup in the front pocket of her apron. ‘Don’t tell anyone. About the tea I mean.’

‘Go now,’ said Hannalore. ‘Your transgression is safe with me.’

 

6

 

Five days before Hannalore’s period of interment was due to finish, Sarah came early with the plate of bread and honey. She looked exhausted. Her headscarf was loosely tied allowing strands of wispy grey hair to fall about her furrowed face and neck. She brought the news that Hannalore was to be released at once. She had held a meeting with the other women last night about Juno and this morning, the elders had given Hannalore permission to resume her normal life.

 

‘Is Juno ill?’

‘She has not spoken a word since you were sentenced. All she does is sit and rock and yesterday she began to bang her head against the kitchen door.’

‘I must go to her.’

‘Eat first, that was the instruction.’

 

Hannalore bolted down her bread. She barely noticed the cup of tea that Sarah had brought for her. She poured some water from her jug into the washbowl and threw handfuls of cold water over her face. She went to her shelf and unfolded her clothes and dressed with haste; woollen leggings, cotton camisole, long skirt, blouse, calico coverall.  

 

‘I tried to stop her,’ said Sarah, ‘but she would not listen to me.’

‘It only makes things worse to argue with her, you know that.’

 

Sarah’s face crumpled. Hannalore felt a moment of compassion for her. When Sarah had lost her son Harry two years ago in the influenza epidemic she had turned almost overnight into a frail old woman. Her flesh seemed to melt away and her bones became clearly visible beneath her skin. She had fallen back into the interior of her body as if she no longer had a right to live there.

 

Hannalore was not able to comfort her. It was all she could do to stay upright. Her legs had weakened since she had been forced to be idle. There was something else taking over her body; a growing feeling of resentment. She could feel it beginning to invade her blood and bones like a slow but insistent poison. Why was it that both she and Juno were being punished? What had she done? She had obeyed the rules of the community to the letter. She had saved a stranger from drowning. And now the others were asking for her help to pacify Juno.

 

‘I’m ready,’ said Hannalore.

‘Put on your headscarf,’ said Sarah. ‘Don’t make any more trouble for yourself.’

 

7

 

Juno was in the small room at the back of the meeting hut that was designated as a sick bay, a place where ill people could be segregated from the healthy workers. The two iron hospital beds were empty. A small white cupboard between the beds concealed a commode. A shelf holding a collection of medicines was attached to the wall. Bottles of zinc sulphate, quinine, aspirin and friar’s balsam stood in neat rows. Lumps of camphor sewn into muslin bags hanging from hooks above the shelf provided a pungent medicinal aroma to the spartan room. 

 

Juno was standing between the beds. Her brown eyes were small and deep like the glass eyes on a child’s soft toy. Her body quivered. She looked ready to run away at a moment’s notice.

 

‘I have brought Hannalore to you,’ said Sarah.

Juno did not respond.

‘Maybe it would be better if we went out into the bush,’ said Hannalore.

‘The wind has turned,’ said Sarah. ‘Heavy rain will soon be upon us.’

‘We could go to the kitchen and sit on the settle out of the way of the workers.’ 

‘No,’ said Sarah. ‘Juno has spoken bad words there and abused the food. Augusta said it’s enough to sour the milk.’

‘I could feed her,’ said Hannalore. ‘She will take sustenance from me.’

‘I shouldn’t be telling you this but there’s a move underway to get rid of her.’

 

Hannalore was shocked. She hoped that Juno had not heard what Sarah had said. Juno’s eyes still held that floating gaze, empty and unfocussed, as if she could not see what was right in front of her face but that did not mean that she could not hear. 

 

Sarah lowered her voice. ‘We can no longer afford to keep her. There is talk of sending her to an orphanage in town.’

 

Juno gave a strange cry and fell to the floor. Hannalore crouched down and held her in her arms. Juno began to bang her head against the wooden floor.

 

Thump! Thump! Thump!

 

Hannalore tried to hold Juno’s head upright but the child resisted her. Hannalore cried out to Sarah but the old woman had gone.

 

Thump! Thump! Thump!

 

Hannalore had never seen Juno like this before. She did not know what to do. All she could think of was to hum a tune. A ballad she had once heard swam up into her mind. She had forgotten the words so she sang the melody to the nonsense sounds of da da da… da da da…

 

Juno stopped banging her head. She garbled something to Hannalore about a terrible noise of coughing, a child gasping for breath. She could see other bad things too; a man’s back covered with black spots and a lady with blood running from her nose, down her front, all over her blouse.  

 

Hannalore sang da da da again to Juno. She stroked Juno’s cheeks and told her not to be afraid. ‘Pay no attention to those shades. Snap! Snap your fingers like I taught you to do, walk backwards around a circle, throw salt, anything to put them in their place.’

 

The room darkened, and soon the rain was pinging off the iron roof like gun shots. Juno asked for a candle. She smiled with delight when Hannalore opened the little cupboard between the beds and brought out the stub of a candle and a box of wax vestas from behind the commode. On the cover of the matchbox was a white swan. Inside the box were three matches. Hannalore gave one to Juno. She tried to light it by striking the match on the wooden door of the cupboard. Hannalore suggested she try it on the sole of her shoe. Juno gave a cry of joy when the match flared up.

 

‘Quickly,’ said Hannalore. ‘Let’s throw some light around.’

 

The candle stub hissed and burned. Juno asked if she could have another match to light with her shoe. Hannalore said no. There were just two left in the box.  They had to be saved for something more important. Juno asked if she could have the swan box when it was empty.

 

‘Of course,’ said Hannalore. ‘But first you have to be very brave.’

Juno nodded.

‘And you have to promise me that you can keep a really big secret.’

Juno nodded again.

‘We are going away, just you and me.’

Juno clapped her hands. ‘A holiday!’

‘Something like that,’ said Hannalore. ‘But no one else must find out.’

‘Can you sing the da da song again?’

‘Not now. We are going to the kitchen to have something to eat.’  

 

She placed the box of swan vestas and a bottle of aspirin into her coverall pocket. She unhooked a camphor bag from the wall and hung it beneath Juno’s camisole to keep her safe from harm. The candle stub spluttered out. 

 

They came out of the sick bay. There was no one in the meeting room. They ran hand in hand to the kitchen porch that provided some shelter against the driving rain. Hannalore’s legs ached with the unaccustomed movement. She knew then that she must lie low for a few days in order to regain her strength for the journey ahead.  

 

Hannalore opened the kitchen door. Augusta was turning out a loaf onto a wire cooling rack. There was a delicious smell of hot bread.

 

Sarah was stirring a soup pot on the coal range. ‘Two drowned rats,’ she said.  

‘Sorry,’ said Hannalore.

‘Dripping all over my clean floor,’ said Augusta.

‘Sorry,’ repeated Hannalore.

‘You will be, if you don’t keep that wretched child under control.’

 

Sarah replaced the lid on the soup pot. She unwound the rope that held the clothesline securely in place and lowered it down from the roof. She plucked a threadbare towel from the pulley and helped Juno to dry her face and hair.

 

Augusta was knocking down the dough for the next batch of bread. She hit the dough with the side of her hand until it was almost flat then folded it up into smaller rectangles before knocking it down again. Thump! Thump! Thump!

 

The sound made Hannalore nervous.

 

Juno emerged from Sarah’s vigorous rubbing with the towel. Her cheeks were flushed with heat and her eyes glittered. ‘Not allowed to tell,’ she said. Augusta’s busy hands stopped in mid air above the dough.

 

‘It’s just an old tune without words,’ said Hannalore. ‘I told her to keep it a secret.’ 

‘Da da da,’ sang Juno.

 

Augusta resumed torturing her dough. Sarah shook out the damp towel and hung it back on the line. She placed two bowls on the table and filled them with potato and mutton broth. She took a serrated knife and hacked two slices from the hot loaf.

 

‘I need to make sandwiches for the men’s lunches from that,’ said Augusta. ‘Look how you’ve shredded it.’

 

Hannalore was hungry. She wolfed down the hot meaty soup, almost scalding her throat in the process. Juno ate more slowly, pausing now and then to repeat Augusta’s words you’ve shredded it, shredded it, shredded it… until Augusta threw her arms up into the air and walked out of the door saying that she’d had enough, it was more than a body could bear.

 

Sarah took over the bread making. She rolled some dough into thin strips and plaited them together to make a decoration for her loaves. Juno asked her if she could make a little loaf. Sarah gave her some dough, a rolling pin, and a tin with holes in the lid to dust the pastry board with flour. Juno soon became engrossed in her task.

 

‘Look at her,’ said Hannalore. ‘It takes so little to keep her happy. The orphanage would break her heart. And mine.’

‘We can’t carry a non-productive member no matter how much it grieves us.’

‘Juno is capable of doing domestic work if someone is there to guide her,

‘There is some resentment against her,’ said Sarah.

‘Why?’

‘For not dying in the flu epidemic when the normal ones did.’

 

Hannalore was shocked into silence. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask Sarah if she felt like that over the loss of her son Harry. Sarah opened the oven door and turned the loaves so that the crusts would brown evenly. She mumbled something about having to accept God’s will, like it or not.

 

Juno had made a mess. The table and the floor were sprinkled with flour. The dough that she had tried to make into a plaited loaf was blackened from constant kneading with her grubby fingers. She asked if her little loaf could go into the oven after the big ones were cooked.

 

‘Of course,’ said Hannalore. ‘And then you can eat it while it’s hot.’

‘It’s filthy,’ said Sarah. ‘Fit only for the pig bucket.’

Hannalore placed her spoon carefully into her empty soup bowl. She managed to anchor her rage deep within her body.   

‘Pig bucket pig bucket,’ cried Juno.

‘No,’ said Hannalore. ‘We will smother the little loaf in melted butter and eat it together.’

‘Promise?’

‘Promise.’

 

8

 

Two nights after the scene in the kitchen Hannalore was awakened by something blowing softly into her left ear. At first she thought that a flapping moth had taken up residence inside her head but then she heard a faint whisper. ‘Wake up, wake up.’ It was Sarah.

 

‘Has something happened to Juno?’

‘No, she’s sound asleep.’

‘Can’t this wait until the morning? I’m tired.’

‘Sorry,’ said Sarah. ‘But I need to speak with you urgently.’ 

 

Heavy rain was falling. The howling wind performed a series of suspended cadences that never quite developed into a decisive final note. Hannalore crept out of the hut and followed Sarah to the kitchen. 

    

Sarah raked the glowing embers in the fire box with the poker. She put some small logs onto the embers and the dry bark on the wood flared up with a hissing sound. She filled the teapot with boiling water from the tap at the side of the range and brought out the milk jug and the jar of sugar from the safe. 

 

‘I know that you are leaving,’ she said.

 

Hannalore took a gulp of hot tea that almost burnt her gullet. It had been a mistake to trust Juno. She did not understand the necessity for secrecy. The girl had no guile, no artifice and she trusted all adults implicitly.

 

Hannalore decided to bluff it out. ‘Whatever do you mean?’

‘For what it’s worth, I believe that you’re doing the right thing. I have worked out a plan. I’ve borrowed bed rolls and a pikau for you to take. But you must be careful. Winter time is dangerous in the bush.’

‘Thank you,’ said Hannalore. ‘But why are you taking such a risk?’

 

Sarah poured more tea into her cup. ‘I have not always been kind to you and Juno and I wish to make amends. You must leave as soon as possible. A man and a lady are coming from the orphanage when the weather clears to take Juno away.’ She went over to the sideboard and retrieved a stained manila envelope from the back of the cupboard. ‘Photographs,’ she said. ‘You will need to take them with you.’ She laid out three photographs on the table and placed the candle closer to Hannalore.

 

One photograph was of a shop window displaying men’s clothing. The second one was of a young woman dressed in a satin gown with an intricate pleated bodice and the last one was the same woman, a little older, holding a baby dressed in a sailor suit.

 

‘Eleanor,’ said Hannalore. ‘God help me, it’s Eleanor.’

‘And you, in the sailor suit, dressed as a boy.’

 

Hannalore could not take her eyes off the face of her young mother dressed in her satin finery. She was beautiful. The iridescent perfection of her skin glowed through the matt sepia surface with the lustre of pearls.    

 

Sarah complained of feeling faint. She fetched a pillow and propped herself up on the settle. Hannalore offered her another cup of tea. Sarah shook her head.

 

Someone knocked on the kitchen door. Hannalore ignored it at first. It was barely audible above the raging wind playing havoc with a flapping sheet of tin on the roof. The knocking became more insistent. Hannalore placed the photographs back into the manila envelope and hid it beneath her night shirt but before she could blow out the candle, the kitchen door opened.

 

It was Jimmy. He was dressed in dripping wet oilskins and leather boots. He stood in the doorway awkwardly with his sodden hat in his hands. 

 

‘Take off your boots and come close to the fire,’ said Sarah. ‘You’ll catch your death.’

‘It’s a filthy night outside,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we should wait a little longer.’

Sarah said that she had just suffered one of her turns and that she must keep still for a few moments until the blood came back into her face. Hannalore asked him what he was doing here.

 

‘Enough,’ said Sarah, ‘let’s get down to business. Jimmy is part of my plan for your escape. He will take you and Juno to the edge of the bush before first light. He will show you how to follow the river to where you are headed. You are going to Piopio.’

‘Time for me to go and catch Prince and prepare the konaki,’ said Jimmy.

‘We should go and wake Juno soon,’ said Sarah. ‘I will help to pack her things.’ 

 

Hannalore waited until Jimmy had closed the kitchen door behind him before she removed the photographs from her night shirt. She took them out of the envelope and laid them out on the table. The young woman was looking down at the baby in the sailor suit with a look of utter adoration. The baby could not be, was not, an image of Hannalore when young. To be so loved and then abandoned made no sense.

 

Sarah looked shrunken and somehow diminished in the flickering candlelight. She offered Hannalore some waterproof wrapping to protect the photographs from the rain.

‘I should have given you these images a long time ago,’ she said, ‘but I was afraid that you would find them unsettling.’

‘You were right,’ said Hannalore.

 

Outside, the storm-driven rain roared like an inland tidal sea. Hannalore thought she heard Sarah whisper, please forgive me but it might have been the desperate sigh of a tree fern being uprooted from the sodden ground or some drowning animal fighting for a final gasp of air against the power of the storm.

 

Sarah stood up. ‘Come now,’ she said. ‘My head has settled. It’s time to leave.’

 

9

 

The konaki proved to be a problem right from the start. Jimmy said little but when he did, he surprised her with the coarseness of his language. Some blankety-blank idiot had attached two small wheels to the back of the sledge and they kept getting caught in the low branches of the bush along the track. He rode slowly and cautiously, but every so often he had to dismount from Prince and chop at the vegetation caught in the wheels with his pig knife. He had to shout over the noise of the wind and the rain and the flailing trees. Another blankety-blank idiot had not put runners on the konaki and if he, Jimmy, ever met this person, he would tell him to go to the hot place.

 

By the time the dawn light appeared the rain had reduced to a dribble and the wind had died down to a mere whisper of its former self. Hannalore marvelled at Juno’s ability to sleep through the severe jolting of their transportation through the terrible night. But as soon as they stopped, Juno awoke. She sat encased in her blankets with her head scarf pulled down low over her forehead. 

 

Jimmy removed the horse from the shafts of the konaki. Juno slid down the front of the sledge onto the ground. She giggled.

 

Hannalore was annoyed. Jimmy could at least have lifted Juno out of the konaki before he released his horse. She could have hurt herself.

 

Jimmy tied on a canvas feedbag over Prince’s head. The horse snuffled and coughed into his oats. Jimmy said that he would light a fire to make tea and dry out their things. He took some shredded bark and small pieces of paper from his pikau. He fiddled about trying to make sparks with a stick of hardwood and a piece of whitey-wood but the dampness defeated him. 

 

Hannalore gave him one of her precious matches. He asked her where she had got it from but she would not tell him. Jimmy said it was a shame that Hannalore had never learned to ride a horse. He could have saddled up one for her and Juno and then they would not be at the mercy of this wretched konaki.

 

‘Do you know where we are?’ he asked.

She shook her head. The paper caught fire and she helped Jimmy to place small pieces of bark in a pyramid shape to feed the flames. Soon, the fire was well alight and when it had died down Jimmy made a flat area in the middle of the embers to make a nest for the billy. When the water boiled, he lifted the billy out of the fire and placed it on the ground. He removed the lid and threw in a handful of tea. He gave it a vigorous stir with his pig knife.

 

‘Now we must wait for it to steep,’ he said. ‘Nothing worser than rushed bush tea.’

 

‘I’m hungry,’ said Juno. Hannalore opened her pikau and took out a brown paper parcel. Inside were two honey sandwiches, four slices of thick unbuttered bread and a small wheel of cheese. She offered a slice of bread to Jimmy. He shook his head and beckoned to Juno. ‘Got pork hocks in my saddlebag. Come over here and get some meat.’ 

 

Juno came closer to the fire. Hannalore felt uneasy, not at what Jimmy had said but the tone of his voice. He kept staring at Juno’s face as if he had never seen her before. He tipped up the billy and poured strong dark tea into chipped enamel mugs. Juno wolfed down the chunks of fatty meat and gristle that Jimmy hacked from one of the hocks. She wanted to know how the pig walked after someone took its legs away.

 

Jimmy laughed. ‘Oh aren’t you the funny one, a breath of fresh air you are.’

 

Hannalore’s unease deepened. She had known Jimmy since she came to the settlement with Juno and Eleanor. He was a few years older than her and had always seemed a quiet young man, respectful of his uncle Abraham and the other elders. He was gentle with the farm animals and, unlike some of the other men, never whipped his dog or kicked the house cows. 

 

Now, it seemed as if he was playing a different game. He had taken on an air of authority over them, an ownership. Hannalore wondered why he was helping them when he knew of the possible consequences of his action.

 

The bush was wet and dripping with moisture. The horse had dozed off with his feedbag still attached to his head. Jimmy put some more fuel on the fire.

‘Time is moving on,’ said Hannalore. ‘Perhaps we should resume our journey.’

‘Soon,’ said Jimmy. Then he told them a story of a boy and a girl who fell in love and who had run away from the settlement. They had become lost in the bush.  

‘Were they punished?’

‘They died of cold and hunger. But their ghosts live on in the bush. Listen, can you hear what they are doing?’

 

Hannalore saw a look of panic on Juno’s face at the mention of ghosts. ‘Come Juno,’ she said. ‘Help me pack up the food.’

 

Jimmy made a circle of his left index finger and thumb and jabbed his other index finger up and down inside the circle.

 

Hannalore hoped that Juno had not seen this sickening gesture. Jimmy jumped to his feet and said that he was not prepared to risk his horse by going any further. Those blankety-blank wheels on the konaki had to go. 

 

Hannalore was afraid. Without transport, she and Juno were in danger of becoming trapped here. There were entirely at Jimmy’s mercy. His behaviour was becoming more disquieting by the minute. She did not believe the story about the dead lovers. The women in the settlement would have known about it and told the story over and over again. Stories of love and loss were their favourite tales especially when the characters broke the rules and were punished for it by an ever vigilant God.  

 

Juno drained her mug. ‘Can’t read my tea leaves,’ she said. ‘Too many.’

‘Wait here,’ said Jimmy. ‘I need to go into the gulley below and cut some totara.’

‘What for?’ asked Hannalore.

‘Makeshift runners,’ said Jimmy. ‘Those wheels have to go.’

 

Hannalore took Juno’s mug and saw a tangle of dark brown tea leaves clinging to the sides. ‘Bunches of grapes,’ she said. ‘Luscious fruit and an important journey.’

‘I want the grapes now,’ said Juno. ‘Sweet in my mouth.’

Hannalore could hear Jimmy thrashing about below them and then the rhythmic chopping of his axe. ‘We have to go now,’ she whispered. ‘You fold the bed rolls and I’ll pack the pikau.’

Juno pushed out her lower lip. This was her signal that she did not want to do what Hannelore asked of her. 

‘We must leave here,’ said Hannalore.

Juno pushed her bottom lip out even further. 

 

The sound of chopping stopped. Hannalore, feeling more and more certain that they were in danger, told Juno that there were ghosts here, dangerous ones with little red eyes.

Juno sprang to her feet and followed Hannalore’s instructions to fold up the bed rolls. Hannalore grabbed a water bottle and a canvas ground sheet from the konaki. She untied the horse’s halter and smacked him lightly on the rump. Prince did not run away as she had planned. He stood there blinking at her in the morning light. She tried once more but again he just looked at her and blew air through his nostrils and stamped his white feathered feet up and down, up and down.

 

Hannalore and Juno walked away as quietly as they could. Hannalore turned for one last look at Prince and saw him toss his big head sideways, as if to say goodbye.

‘Are the red eyes gone?’ asked Juno.

‘We will soon be safe.’

‘Cross your heart?’

‘Da da da and hope to die.’

 

10

 

They struggled for hours through thick bush. Hannalore had no idea where they were. She knew that they should try to find a creek and follow it downhill until it joined a larger river, but they seemed to be climbing uphill for most of the time. Although the rain had stopped the trees were still dripping with moisture. The bush was stirring with birds drying off their feathers. A few drowsy bees drifted around looking for nectar. The air smelled fresh and sharp with an aroma that Hannalore recognised as rewarewa, the native honeysuckle. She took this early flowering to be a good omen that warm dry weather was on its way and that soon this wild wet winter would be over.

 

A kereru flapped noisily just above Juno’s head. She shrieked and tripped over a fallen ponga. She cut open her left leg just beneath the knee and shrieked even more loudly when she saw the blood emerging from a rip in her woollen stocking.

 

Hannalore tore the fabric away from the cut. She washed the wound with a handful of precious water from the bottle. She retrieved the package of sandwiches from the pikau and smeared her fingers with honey. She transferred the honey from her fingers to the patch of blood below Juno’s knee. The blood thickened and the bleeding stopped.   

Juno said that she wanted to go home. She hated the bush, she hated the bird that had tried to cut her legs off with its wings. If they had stayed with Jimmy he would have killed it stone dead. 

 

‘Hush now,’ said Hannalore. ‘You must be brave. We still have a long way to go.’

 

Juno announced that she was hungry. Hannalore waited until Juno had eaten some cheese and one of the thick pieces of bread before she suggested that they keep on walking.

Juno was reluctant to move. She said that her feet hurt and she was tired. Out came her lower lip again.

 

Hannalore lifted her pikau onto her back. ‘I’m off then,’ she said. ‘See you later.’ She left Juno lying against the fallen ponga trunk and did not look back. It was on the tip of her tongue to tell the girl that this journey was to save her from the clutches of strangers but she knew that it was pointless to try to make Juno understand her vulnerability. Juno had just one version of events, her own. Her world was what she saw from her own eyes and what she heard through her own ears. 

 

Hannalore remembered something that Sarah had said when she passed on the information that the community wanted to get rid of Juno. Be careful not to build your life around another person. To love too much can be the worst sort of tyranny.

 

Hannalore paused to get her breath. Several days ago it had become clear to her that Juno’s expulsion was not the only reason she was leaving the settlement. It had provided the catalyst and the justification for her actions but there were deeper issues at stake. The long period of solitude imposed upon her by the elders had given her time to think about herself. This was against the rules of the community. Selfishness, in all its manifestations, had to be ruthlessly stamped out. 

 

Hannalore heard something rustle in the undergrowth. She and Juno sometimes played hide and seek in the bush.  It could be that Juno was creeping up on her. The undergrowth at the edge of the track was thick with the tangled spiked branches of juvenile matai. Hannalore left the track and crouched behind a tree trunk. She waited to hear Juno reciting the familiar chant, coming ready or not!

 

Something moved behind her. She jumped up and turned around. Facing her was a black and white dog, a border collie. The dog moved slowly towards her with its stomach close to the ground, stalking her. It did not take its eyes off her, almost mesmerising her. She saw two eyes staring up at her, one brown the other a startling blue ringed in black.

 

‘Here boy,’ she said. ‘Here boy, come here.’

 

The dog seemed confused. It stopped in mid track, lowered its eyes and trotted off without making a sound. Hannalore wondered where the dog had come from. She knew all the dogs at the settlement. She had raised some of them from puppies, spoiling them until they were ready to be taken away by the men to be trained into working dogs. 

 

This animal was out of its territory. Unless it was lost, there must be someone who had allowed it to come into the dense bush. The dog would know how to return to his master. Perhaps she could persuade the dog to come back to her and lead her down to cleared ground and to the river bank. She put her fingers in her mouth and whistled. Nothing. She whistled again, more loudly this time. Again, no response.

 

She was not looking forward to another night out in the high country with Juno. As if on cue, she heard Juno calling out to her. ‘Where are you? Where are you?’

 

Hannalore ran back along the track. She found Juno walking along slowly with her head down. Hannalore said she was sorry for leaving her for so long. She asked her where the bed rolls were.

‘Dunno,’ said Juno.

‘You must have left them somewhere. We can go back and find them together.’

‘Jimmy took them.’

‘Did you see him?’

‘Dunno.’

‘Never mind. We can find some ferns to make a bed.’

Juno cheered up. ‘Make a bed, make a bed.’

 

They walked on. Hannalore told Juno about the strange dog with one brown eye and one blue eye. Juno claimed to have seen him too. He could not bark so he said hello chickadee to her instead.

 

Towards the end of the afternoon they stumbled upon a track that Hannalore hoped would lead them out of the high country. Much to her relief, it did. They descended a steep hill. The bush thinned out. The ground beneath their feet became wet and swampy. Now, there were cabbage trees and rafts of dense green flax bushes and wading birds rising up in huge flocks into the fading sun.

 

They came upon a creek in flood. Hannalore filled the empty water bottle. The light was deepening. They moved onto higher ground. Juno said she was hungry and tired and that there was a blister on her heel. Hannalore said soon we will eat but first we will make our bivouac for the night.

 

She took a knife from her pikau and slashed some branches from a clump of silver tree-ferns that grew close to an outcrop of rock. A cleft in the rock provided some shelter from the rising south-westerly wind. She unfolded the canvas ground sheet she had taken from Jimmy’s konaki. Her initial idea was to string it up to make a roof but she did not have a cord to pass through the metal eyelets to secure it to the rock. 

 

Juno played with a fern frond turning it round and round from green to silver and back again. Hannalore asked her to put it back on the ground with the others. It was part of their bed for the night. Juno refused. Hannalore felt like shaking her but she knew that she must not show anger or fear in front of Juno. Every decision she made from this moment on would have a direct bearing on whether or not they survived.

 

‘Don’t wanna sleep here,’ said Juno.

‘But you like the silver leaves. Look how they shine.’

‘I want to go to the little house.’

‘We can’t go back. Sarah would be angry with us.’

‘Sarah not here.’

Hannalore gave up trying to reason with Juno. She unwrapped the remains of the bread and the cheese wheel. Juno ate most of it and drank the water bottle dry. Then she announced that she wanted to go to the dunny to do number twos. Where was it?

 

‘You’ll have to use the ground. Go over there behind the rock well away from our shelter,’ said Hannalore. ‘I’ll go back to the creek to get some more water. Stay close, don’t stray.’

 

Juno nodded. Hannalore made her way back to the flooded creek and refilled the bottle. She found a small bush of rangiora half way up the bank and collected some of the leaves for Juno to use as toilet paper. She sat for a while on a flat rock looking down at the rushing water breaking over the sandstone outcrops at the edge of the bank.

 

The task of keeping Juno free from fear and physical harm was greatly magnified out here in the wilderness. Back at the settlement there were always others to share the burden. Perhaps she had been too hasty in stealing this needy and damaged child away. But things could be worse. This creek could lead them into a tributary of the Mokau. Tomorrow at first light she planned to follow the direction of the water and see where it takes them. But first she needed to get both of them through the night.

 

10

 

She hurried back to their shelter through the darkening air. The wind had died down. The cabbage trees had transformed their spiked heads into stark silhouettes against the backdrop of a vivid sunset muddied by black streaks of dissipating rain clouds.

 

She reached the rocky outcrop. The canvas groundsheet and the pikau were gone. Where was Juno? She called to her. There was no reply. She called again, more loudly this time. Again, no answer. She put her fingers in her mouth and gave a piercing whistle. The rays of the dying sun slipped down another notch.

 

She sank down onto the fronds of silver fern and put her face in her hands. This was the end. Juno could be drowning nearby in a foul swamp, calling for her, deathly afraid. Or perhaps Jimmy had tracked them down and taken Juno away. This would explain the missing pikau and groundsheet.

 

Something touched her left leg. It was the dog with the odd eyes. He pressed his damp nose once more against her leg. He made no sound. Hannalore grasped his collar. She was determined that the dog was not going to leave her again. She tied her headscarf onto his collar to make a short lead. The dog did not seem to mind and made no effort to get away.  She walked him around the rocky outcrop for a few minutes. She had hoped that he would take her to Juno. ‘Seek,’ she said. ‘Seek, seek.’

 

But he just stared up at her with one luminous blue eye and one dull brown one, docile, obedient, walking when she walked, stopping when she stopped. 

 

Then she saw it; a light shining from within a dense cluster of manuka and cabbage trees in the distance. A flickering light. And that meant human company.

 

She ran, holding onto the short lead on the dog’s collar, almost choking him in the process. He willingly kept pace with her.

 

The light had seemed close at first but the more she ran, the further away the grove of trees seemed to be. Her shoes were heavy with mud and her calf muscles were stricken with cramps. A tremor began to beat inside her chest; tick tick tick. She wondered if she was losing her senses.

 

Then the dog stopped running. He lay flat on the ground and rested his face on his front paws.  Hannalore untied the headscarf from the dog’s collar. ‘Sorry boy,’ she said. ‘You are as lost as I am.’

 

The dog jumped to his feet and set off at a good pace. He ran ahead of Hannalore and when she faltered he waited for her to catch up. Ah, there were the cabbage trees and the manuka and there was the light, stronger now. She did not see the hut at first. It blended in perfectly with the trees that sheltered it. It was a raupo hut, partly demolished, but with most of the walls still intact. And yes, there was a fire burning inside. Wisps of smoke threaded between the gaps in the bundles of nikau palms that formed the low slung roof. A finger of smoke rose from the slab chimney set apart from the back wall. The entrance lay open to the weather, the door long gone. 

 

Juno was inside, sitting on a wooden butter box close to the chimney, holding her hands out to the fire. 

 

‘Who brought you here?’ asked Hannalore.

‘No one,’ said Juno. ‘I seen it for myself.’

 

Hannalore looked around. The hut was old, and did not seem to be inhabited. There was a rectangular gap in the side wall that could have performed the function of a window but there was no glass, just the chewed remnants of a sheet of unbleached calico that someone had tacked over the opening to keep out the wind.

 

‘Rats,’ said Juno. ‘Eat everything.’

 

There was a pile of dry bark and some small logs stacked neatly near the chimney. The pikau and the canvas groundsheet were placed upon the clay floor.  

‘Do you like our little house?’ asked Juno.

‘It’s lovely,’ said Hannalore. ‘You are very clever. How did you light the fire?’

‘I took the swan box from your pikau.’

‘You should have waited for me. That was our last match.’

 

Juno pushed out her lower lip. To distract her, Hannalore drew her attention to the dog lying down at the doorway. Juno patted him and tried to make him enter the hut but he would not. Hannalore said that is yet another proof that he is a working dog, trained to stay outside. ‘Someone must be out looking for him and that comforts me.’

 

Juno smiled. ‘Look, on the shelf.’

‘Food tins?’

‘I put one on the fire. Dunno what’s inside, rat got the label.’

 

Hannalore grabbed two pieces of wood to use as a lever to pluck the tin from the flames. The tin was already bulging, about to explode. Juno laughed. Hannalore waited until the tin was cool and then stabbed it with her knife. A putrid smell like dead fish blew out into their expectant faces. After her initial shock, Juno laughed again. Then she pleaded for something nice to eat. She claimed that her stomach was like an empty paper bag with teeth and that it had started to eat itself. 

 

Hannalore took a flannel from the pikau and moistened a corner with a little water. She wiped Juno’s face and hands. She explained that there was just half a piece of bread left. It must not be eaten tonight. They would share it in the morning.

 

Juno yawned. She said that she could not stay awake. Hannalore made a nest for her out of the canvas ground sheet. The dirt floor in the centre of the hut was hard and shiny unlike the damp sections at the sides of the hut. But Juno did not want to go to sleep in the middle of the floor. She said that things can walk around her and when the fire goes out it will be too dark to see the old people standing at the end of her bed. Hannalore promised that she would try to keep the fire burning all night. Juno grumbled a little longer but soon her eyes closed and she fell into a deep sleep.

 

Hannalore slept fitfully throughout the long night. She was vaguely aware of a passing storm that dumped a copious amount of rain on their shelter. She was surprised at how dry the floor was in spite of the open doorway and the holes in the roof. Once she heard something or someone howling mournfully through the trees. This thing seemed to call her name but in the end she decided that it was just the wind. She awoke stiff and cold and hungry. Her ankles were swollen. The fire had almost died down. She fed the embers with some dried bark and some of the smaller pieces of wood. Soon, small red and yellow flames licked around the edges of the logs. She held out her hands to the warmth and felt a flicker of life move up into her arms. 

 

She hobbled outside the raupo hut to find a place where she could pass water without disturbing the still sleeping Juno. The wind had died down taking the rain with it. The dawn light filtered through a thin mist that shrouded the tops of the cabbage trees. The silence hummed. She crouched underneath a clump of manuka. The hot urine splashed against the inside of her thighs.

 

The smoke from the fire drifted slowly upwards from the top of the slab chimney. There was no sign of the blue-eyed dog. Hannalore wiped herself with her headscarf. She wondered what Sarah would think if she could see her doing this. She tied the damp cloth to the manuka as a token of her presence here, or perhaps to leave a message. 

 

She did not know what to do. She did not want to spend another day walking. Both she and Juno needed to rest. They had little food left and after the experience with the rotten fish the night before she was not pinning her hopes on finding anything edible in the remaining tins. 

 

She went back into the hut and put some more wood on the fire. Juno awoke and began asking for food. Hannalore told her that she thought it best that they stay here for one more day and one more night so that they could rest. Then they would follow the river to find some houses and people who would feed them. Juno said that she wanted to leave right now; she had liked the little house yesterday but not today.

 

Hannalore opened her pikau to retrieve the last piece of bread. All that was left was a chewed piece of brown paper and some fresh rodent droppings.

 

‘The rats, the rats, the rats,’ said Juno.

‘I forgot all about them.’

‘I want my breakfast.’

‘There’s no bread left.’

‘I’ll have porridge then.’    

 

It took all of Hannalore’s strength not to break down. She had been deluding herself. What on earth had possessed her to believe that she could care for Juno all on her own? Sometimes she felt more like a child of five than a grown woman. We are truly sisters, she thought. Others have always decided what I should do and say and be. The same thing has happened to her. I don’t know if this can ever be undone.

 

‘You have persuaded me that we should leave today,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’

‘I’m hungry.’

 ‘I’ll find some porridge for you.’

‘Promise?’

‘Promise.’

11

 

They walked for hours along the river bank. The water was high and brown and agitated. Sometimes, they had to clamber up crumbling chalk banks and sandstone rocks in narrow canyons to keep themselves from being swept away by the flood waters. Juno kept up a low grizzle of complaint. Hannalore tried to make their journey into a game but Juno refused to participate. Hannalore made sure that they stopped often to rest their feet. Each time they set off again Juno asked the same questions. How much longer? Where are the houses and the people?

 

In the late afternoon the rain came back. The icy needles pierced their naked faces. They were soaked through, hungry, tired, and lost. Juno’s hands were blue. Her eyes had retreated into their sockets. She had stopped complaining and this worried Hannalore far more than the incessant questions. Juno was tiny for her age, frail, and with soft bones. She was not able to cope with the ordinary vicissitudes of life. This had been told to Hannalore often enough by Sarah and Augusta. Hannalore had resisted this view of Juno but now, watching her body shut down, she knew that they were right.

 

Hannalore decided to leave the river bank and find some trees or overhanging rocks where they could get out of the rain. They struggled up the river bank and shortly came upon a clump of regenerating manuka. Hannalore spread the canvas sheet on some low branches and they crawled beneath it. She took a small towel from her pikau to rub down Juno’s face and hair but it was soaking wet. All of their things were.  

 

Juno fell asleep almost at once. Hannalore tried to rouse her but could not. She was becoming very afraid. Was this the place where death would come to take Juno away from her? She was not concerned with her own survival. Apart from her blistered feet and her swollen ankles she felt strong enough to walk out of this place and find a settlement on the river even if it took several days.

 

Night fell. Hannalore drifted into sleep. The first thing she knew about the return of the blue-eyed dog was his hot tongue licking her cold wet face. She clung to his fur and pleaded with him not to leave her. The dog obliged. Although his coat was wet his body was warm. Hannalore pushed him close to Juno. She stirred and put her thin arms around his neck. They huddled together beneath the canvas sheet for what seemed to Hannalore to be an interminable length of time.

 

Towards dawn, she heard a muffled whistle coming from the distance. The dog pricked up his ears. Hannalore was instantly on the alert. Was it Jimmy coming to find them? The whistle came again, much closer this time. Hannalore heard a horse whinny. The dog jumped to his feet. Hannalore tried to hold on to him but he was too strong for her.

 

Hannalore crawled out from the canvas cover and walked a short distance to the edge of the regenerating manuka. If it was Jimmy who had found them she knew that she had to seek help from him. She had no choice. Juno must survive.

 

But it was not Jimmy, it was Mr Cattermole, leading two horses roped together. He was resplendent in his oil skins and his leather hat and his obvious concern at the state she was in. Hannalore led Mr Cattermole to the canvas shelter and he said Jesus wept and wrapped Juno in a grey wool blanket. He lifted her up and placed her into one of the saddle bags on his pack horse after he had emptied the bag of its contents. Hannelore almost wept with relief when she saw the packages of flour, tea, dried beans and oatmeal.

 

‘Come now,’ he said. ‘We must return to the raupo hut.’

‘Is there not somewhere closer?’

‘Is is only about a mile from here.’

‘But we walked for hours.’

He smiled. ‘You went round and round in circles.’

‘But we followed the river.’

‘It snakes back on itself, a tricky beast that has led many men astray.’

 

Hannalore stumbled. Mr Cattermole offered to lift her into the saddle of his lead horse. She declined. She wanted to stay on the ground, putting one foot down after another, her mind grappling with the possibility that Mr Cattermole could be a threat to her and Juno. He was a stranger after all, and someone from outside. The category of outsider was one that she had learned to fear since she was five years old. She could not forget that Mr Cattermole had winked at her during the community hearing, a wink that seemed to say only we know what really happened when you clamped your ruby lips to mine…

 

She had many questions to ask him. Had he been following them? Had he sent the blue-eyed dog as a messenger? How did he know that she and Juno had sought shelter in the raupo hut?

 

He extracted a tin from the inside pocket of his oilskin coat and with great ceremony offered her a barley sugar. A warm rush of sweet saliva filled her mouth.

 

‘That tasted even better than the balm of Gilead judging by the look on your face,’ said Mr Cattermole. 

 

Juno stirred and opened her eyes. She thought it a great joke to be riding in an empty saddle bag. Hannalore was so relieved to hear her giggle that she almost forgave Mr Cattermole for making fun of a sacred text. She was even more relieved when Juno noisily crunched two sweets at once and smiled through her dribble.

 

Soon, the raupo hut came into view. Mr Cattermole tethered his horses to a ponga hitching post near the entrance. Hannalore could not remember seeing it there before. It looked freshly cut. The axe had bitten off the top of a young fern and cut the trunk into three lengths releasing a tangle of fine brown fibre.   

 

Hannalore asked if the horses could pull it down and wander off. Mr Cattermole said they knew which side their bread is buttered on. Besides, Jacka will guard them and will tell me if they begin to roam.

 

The dog lay down across the entrance to the hut staring at Juno. Mr Cattermole told her not to be offended. ‘Jacka has been trained to sit very still and give sheep the evil eye.’

‘Baa baa,’ said Juno.

‘Jacka kept us warm through the night,’ said Hannalore. ‘He probably saved our lives.’

‘No,’ said Mr Cattermole. ‘This did.’

 

He removed a head scarf from the front pocket of his oilskins. ‘Jacka brought it to me. You wore it during the trial, so I knew that it belonged to you. I gave Jacka the command. Find boy, find and stay… and he did.’

 

Hannalore prayed that the rain had washed the smell of her urine from the scarf. ‘Let’s unpack the food now,’ she said. ‘Juno is very hungry.’

 

Mr Cattermole laid out a feast on a sheet of newspaper; a piece of cold damper, a lump of yellow butter wrapped in moist cheese cloth, three thick slices of corned beef and a solitary hard-boiled duck’s egg.

 

Juno asked for porridge.

‘Eat what is in front of you,’ said Hannalore. ‘Please.’

 ‘Can I crack the egg?’

‘Of course,’ said Hannalore.

‘I need to make the fireplace safe before we can cook,’ said Mr Cattermole. ‘It’s a wonder you didn’t set fire to the chimney the state that it’s in.’

 

Juno cracked the egg on the back of her head. It took several blows for the pale blue shell to shatter. Juno took a bite and immediately spat it out.

‘Has it gone bad?’ asked Hannalore.

‘Baby inside,’ said Juno.

She shed a tear for the tiny bird all curled up within the blooded yolk. Hannalore consoled her by telling her that when they had found a safe place to live, Juno could keep some chickens and perhaps a pet duck if there was a creek or a pond near by.

 

‘Can I call it chickadee?’

‘Of course.’

‘Promise?’

‘Promise.’

 

 

12

 

After breakfast, Mr Cattermole announced that they would be staying in the raupo hut until the weather had improved and the horses were rested. There would be plenty of hot food once he got the fireplace and the slab chimney into a workable condition. There were other repairs to be done too; the hut needed a new roof, the floor needed to be re-sealed with wet clay, and there were essential furnishings that were once here but had been stolen away. ‘And here’s the grand thing ladies, everything we need to refurbish our mansion is growing outside and waiting to be plucked without spending a single penny.’

 

Hannalore asked him if the hut belonged to him. He told her that no one owned it. It had been there for many years. Some locals say that it goes back to the days of the land wars and is haunted by the ghost of a redcoat who died there.

 

Hannalore did not like this talk of ghosts. Especially in front of Juno. She asked Mr Cattermole why he wished to make repairs on this place if it was not to be his home.

 

Mr Cattermole said that he and Jacka were occasionally hired to find lost sheep for a farmer. He used this place to rest up and cook himself a meal when he was on a job. He looked upon the raupo hut as an island refuge within a turbulent sea of  

 

He lifted the sheet of newspaper from the dirt floor and began to tear it into strips. Hannalore begged him to save it. She had always wanted to read a newspaper but she had never been permitted. Only the elders had this privilege.  

 

Mr Cattermole handed it over. ‘It won’t be much use to you. Out of date.’

 

Hannalore opened the page carefully and smoothed out the creases. At first she did not understand what it was that she was reading. The page consisted of classified advertisements looking for farm labourers, clerks, insurance salesmen, carpenters, handy men, bakers and drivers.

 

‘So this how it’s done,’ she said. ‘You see a job in the newspaper and you go and get it.’

‘It’s not quite that easy,’ said Mr Cattermole. ‘You’d be better off looking in the women’s magazines for domestic work and sewing, that sort of thing.’

 

But nothing could dampen Hannalore’s enthusiasm. The bottom half of the sheet carried illustrated advertisements for pills and nostrums that purported to cure everything from women’s troubles to irregularity. Hannalore particularly liked the look of Dr Beecham’s Liver Pills; only 1/6 posted anywhere in the country and guaranteed to cure a torpid liver, dyspepsia, and the yellowing of the skin. Just the thing for Juno’s delicate system.

 

Mr Cattermole gave Juno a nosebag of oats for the pack horse Ruby. He explained that this was an important job because the old mare was almost at the end of her life and could not forage as well as the younger lead horse.

 

Juno, full of smiles, carried the nosebag carefully out of the hut.

‘Thank you,’ said Hannalore. ‘It makes her feel part of things when she is entrusted.’

 

Mr Cattermole said that he had an ulterior motive. He did not want to upset the child with what he had to say. Did Hannalore know that two people were out looking for them? He had chanced upon them, a man and a woman, and they had asked him if he had seen a woman and a girl travelling in a konaki driven by a young man called Jimmy.

 

‘What did you tell them?’ asked Hannalore.

‘Nothing. I had no idea at that stage you were out here getting yourself hopelessly lost.’

‘They must be the people from the orphanage. They were coming to take Juno from me.’

‘Why did you run away from Jimmy?’

‘The wheels broke. I didn’t want to wait. Jimmy had to cut new runners from the bush.’

 

Mr Cattermole began to say something about Jimmy but stopped when Juno came running back into the hut. She gave them the news that Ruby had eaten all the oats and in horse-speak had asked for more.   

‘And what answer did you give her?’ said Hannalore.

‘Nay nay.’ 

‘That’s my clever girl.’

 

‘Okay ladies,’ said Mr Cattermole. ‘Let’s get cracking. Time for work now.’

 

Mr Cattermole made it clear that Hannalore and Juno had to do more than just watch him. They would be expected to do some of the hands-on work. Their tasks would be replacing some of the leaky palms on the roof, gathering manuka sticks and mangemange for the construction of a bed, checking the raupo bundles that formed the walls of the hut and, most importantly, lining the fireplace with fresh turf.

 

Hannalore made a fumbling attempt to cut fronds from a clump of juvenile nikau palms growing nearby. Mr Cattermole stepped in and showed her the correct technique with the machete. Soon she was hacking away, until he called out enough! There’s only one roof to mend.

 

Then he suggested that she climb onto the roof of the hut while he handed up the palms and some long thin strips of supplejack. ‘No chance of a light-weight like you crashing through the roof. It happened to me once. I almost broke my back.’

 

Hannalore did her best to fasten the butts of the palm fronds to the ridge pole with the supplejack but she failed. Each time she tried to tie a knot, the supplejack sprang apart and left red welts on her hands and arms. In the end, Mr Cattermole removed his heavy work boots and came up onto the roof to finish the job. He made it look so easy.

 

Hannalore was determined not to show weakness in front of him. ‘I could have done it, once I’d got the hang of it.’

 

She wondered what Sarah and Augusta and the other women from the community would say if they could see her now; skirt hitched up, blood on her fingers from the sharp palm needles, rope burns from the tricky supplejack. Sarah believed that plants were just like people; they have souls and are capable of both good and evil. She said that supplejack is more menacing than most because it grows anti-clockwise in tangled circles and if you watch it very carefully you can actually see it grow inch by inch in a few short hours. Once, not too long ago and not too far from here, a woman lay deathly still in the bush for three days to hide away from the sorrows of the world. When they found her, she was trussed up like a turkey. The supplejack had wound around her neck; it had entered her mouth and lungs and pierced her already broken heart.  

 

Thus spake Sarah, the keeper of the kitchen fire and the teller of moral tales. Hannalore could not get enough of them when she was a child. It seemed to her that every dilemma had its resolution in one of Sarah’s stories. Now, Hannalore felt that she was in alien territory and that Sarah’s voice was stilled, possibly for ever.

 

Juno was in ecstasy. Mr Cattermole had made her his builder’s mate. It was her job to hand him the turfs lying in a neat pile on the floor. He told her how important her job was. One wrong move and everything could go up; oh he had seen it all including an idiot who stoked the fire with totara logs and it hissed and sparked and burnt the whole whare down with him and another shepherd in it. If not for Jacka breaking the door down and leaping all over him he would not be here today. 

 

‘Golden rule,’ he said. ‘Never trust a wooden chimney.’

 

He placed the turfs up the sides and the back of the chimney with the precision of a bricklayer. He took an iron bar that had fallen from the old fireplace and worked it into place. He hung two hooks from the iron bar, one for his blackened pot and one for his kettle. He poured a little water from a canvas water bag into the kettle and lit the fire with some sticks of white pine and the newspaper that had earlier entranced Hannalore. 

 

She watched the flames devour the crumpled paper with a sense of loss. She was deeply hungry with something beyond the need for food. Every muscle in her body ached. She felt as if her flesh was caving in, melding with her joints. There was a repetitive phrase beating away at the back of her ribs, like a run-down clock. What now? What now?

 

In spite of Mr Cattermole’s kindness towards her and Juno, she remained wary of him. She found it difficult to read his behaviour. Back at the community the elders gave the orders and the women and younger men obeyed. End of story. She would never have been encouraged to repair a hut or use a machete. This was men’s work.

 

She had no idea what Mr Cattermole thought of her. Apart from thanking her for saving him from the river he had not discussed the incident with her. Hannalore was grateful for his brevity. The warning that Abraham had given her about becoming a bone-conjuror played constantly on her mind. He had more or less accused her of being one of those malignant beings who could bring back someone from the dead.

 

Mr Cattermole’s drowned death mask haunted her dreams. The first indication that he was returning to life was a slight movement of his lips beneath hers. She found the memory of his wet mouth opening like a ripe fig beneath hers disturbing. She could switch this memory off while she was awake but her dreams were out of control. Sometimes the mouth opened out like a red sea anemone waiting closure by the flick of a finger, sometimes it became a foreign fruit that dissolved into a sweetness so intense that it jolted her awake.  

 

Mr Cattermole said, ‘A penny for them. Thoughts I mean.’

‘Nothing,’ said Hannalore. ‘I’m a little tired that’s all.’

‘Good.’

 

He prised the lid from the bubbling kettle with a stick and threw in a generous handful of tea. He waited until the tea had turned dark orange before he produced three chipped enamel mugs and a tin of condensed milk.

 

Hannalore drank two cups of the hot sweet fluid. Juno had three. Mr Cattermole laughed. He said he had never seen such a greedy pair of girls.             

 

The day wore on. Juno went to sleep on the canvas sheet on the floor.

 

‘I can hear the wind turning towards the south,’ said Mr Cattermole. ‘We might be in for a rough night. It’s almost too late to make the bed but I think we should try. I need you to come with me to carry the mangemange.’

 

Hannalore did not want to leave Juno alone. Mr Cattermole said he would instruct Jacka to stay at the door of the hut and guard her. Hannalore reluctantly agreed.

 

It took almost an hour for them to gather the materials for the bed. When they returned, Jacka was exactly where they had left him and Juno was still fast asleep. Hannalore relaxed. She helped Mr Cattermole to position the four forked manuka branches to make the frame of the bed. He tied two crosspieces into the forks, one at the head and one at the foot. Hannalore laid pliable manuka sticks lengthwise and Mr Cattermole fastened each one onto the crosspieces. The final task was the laying of the mangemange to make a soft springy mattress. 

 

Juno awoke and insisted on being the first one to lie down on the new bed. She said that it was bosker even though it was only a pretend bed. 

 

‘No bouncing,’ said Hannalore.

Juno put out her lower lip. ‘Jimmy let me.’

Mr Cattermole dropped a bundle of kindling close to the fireplace. ‘Let you do what?’

‘Jump in his bed.’

‘Did he indeed.’

‘I’m hungry,’ said Juno. ‘I want my tea.’

 

Mr Cattermole rummaged around in the saddle bag and found three wrinkled kumara and two potatoes. When the fire died down he threw the potatoes and kumara into the ashes. Then he mixed up some flour and salt and water with his hands. The dough took on a greyish tinge. He prised open a tin and told Hannalore to look inside and take a sniff.

 

‘Pure pig fat,’ he said. ‘This is what makes my damper famous.’ He mixed some of the soft white fat into the dough and kneaded it into a round loaf. He placed it in the iron pot and buried it in the hot ashes of the fire.

 

After a while, a comforting smell of cooking infused the hut. Juno asked if she could have the first slice of the bread. Mr Cattermole said that damper needed to cook slowly otherwise it would be raw in the middle. He poked the vegetables with the point of his hunting knife and pronounced that they were ready. He rubbed pig fat and salt over the skins and placed them onto an enamel plate.

 

Juno grabbed a hot potato and dropped it just as quickly. Hannalore consoled her by kissing her hand. ‘All better now,’ said Juno.

 

Night fell. Mr Cattermole lit a tallow candle. It gave out a dim spluttering light and an unpleasant smell. He took the iron pot from the ashes and removed the lid with a stick. The damper was crisp and brown and delicious. They fell upon it like wolves. Mr Cattermole said the grit from the ashes added a little something to the taste.  

 

Outside the hut the wind sang a lament, rising and falling in a minor key.  Mr Cattermole said he had to see a man about a dog. He was away for what seemed to Hannalore to be a long time. When he returned, Juno was lying asleep on the mangemange mattress and Hannalore was sitting on the butter box close to the fire. Mr Cattermole said that it was good to see the little one recovering her strength. All she needed was fire, hot food, and a dry shelter. 

 

Hannalore sighed. ‘You make it sound so simple.’

‘Come outside.’

‘Why?’

‘I want to show you something.’

 

She left the warmth of the hut with reluctance. Jacka was lying outside close to the door. The wind ruffled his black and white coat. ‘Stay,’ said Mr Cattermole. ‘Stay and guard.’

 

He took her arm. They walked a short way along a rough bush track and came out onto a rise. There were few mature trees here and the icy wind came barrelling through the stunted manuka. The sky was clear of clouds. The waning moon was reduced to a mere sliver of curved yellow light. The sky was almost black and studded with many flickering stars. Mr Cattermole said that the ones that remain in a steady state are not stars at all, they are planets. They move around the sun just like we do. And if you listen carefully on such a night as this, you can hear the music of the spheres.

 

Hannalore said all she could hear was the wind. Mr Cattermole said if we could work out a way of measuring the movement of the celestial bodies close to us, we could tune into the sound of the continual dance they perform. Not in the sense of music as we know it, but as a harmonic or mathematical concept that gives us another way of listening.

 

‘Do you understand?’ asked Mr Cattermole.

‘No.’

‘There are many different ways of hearing music once you have learned to listen.’

 

He talked of the internal music of the human body that the ancient Greeks called musica humana.  He said that his quest was to find a link between the body and the more abstract harmonies of the natural world.

 

They walked back to the raupo hut. Jacka was still guarding the door.  Mr Cattermole put more wood on the fire and soon they were drinking tea together and listening to the noise of the wind outside.

 

The heavy rain arrived suddenly. The hut shook and trembled like a wounded animal. Hannalore lay down beside the sleeping Juno and closed her eyes. She did not know if she was asleep or awake or in that confused state in between when she saw Mr Cattermole move away from the fire and climb into bed beside her.

 

She became acutely aware of his body pressing against her own. She made a resolution to stay awake until the dawn. It was not to be. Lulled by his even breathing and the rise and fall of his chest, she soon fell into a deep sleep.

 

This time she dreamed that she was the victim and Mr Cattermole the hero. She was the one trapped at the side of the raging river by trailing willow branches; it was her mouth opening like a ripe fruit, her body rising and falling beneath his. 

 

Sometime during the night the southerly died away and took the heavy rain with it. Hannalore awoke to the clatter of the iron kettle and the smell of hot oatmeal. The bed had moulded to her body during the night and she felt reluctant to move. Mr Cattermole asked if she had slept well. Hannalore said yes and thanked him for his concern. Mr Cattermole said good old mangemange, no wonder they call it the bushmen’s friend.  

 

Juno bolted the hot porridge down and asked for more. Mr Cattermole said help yourself there’s plenty more where that came from.

 

‘Can we have it again tomorrow for breakfast?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Promise?’

‘Promise.’