Song of the Spirits (34 page)

Patrick returned the stare with a fearlessness bordering on insolence.

“Good-bye, Mrs. Sideblossom,” he said. “What should I tell your father?”

Elaine’s mouth was dry, her face pale. “Tell my parents… I’m doing well.”

T
homas did not give Elaine time to make herself presentable for dinner. He ordered her to accompany him as she was. Elaine felt humiliated and dirty in the eyes of the immaculately dressed Zoé and the men, who had exchanged their riding clothes for suits. Emere seemed to notice as well, for the aged Maori studied Elaine with her unfathomable gaze. Disapproving? Assessing? Or merely curious about the reaction of those at table? Elaine, however, could not find fault with Emere’s behavior. She was polite and served very skillfully.

“Emere was trained by my first wife,” John declared without looking at the tall Maori woman. “Thomas’s mother. She died very young, however, and left us with only very few such well-trained servants.”

“Where do these Maori come from anyway?” Elaine asked. “There doesn’t seem to be a village in the area.”

And why was Emere still here instead of married with children? Or seeing to the needs of her tribe? Hadn’t her grandmother said Emere was a
tohunga
? If she was able to draw the
wairua
voice out of the
putorino
, she must be regarded as a powerful witch doctor. Now that Elaine was getting a closer look at her for the first time, the wide heart-shaped face reminded her of somebody. But who? She wracked her brain.

“The men hire themselves on here,” Thomas explained. “As shepherds. They’re the usual ramblers. As for the girls, some of them the men drag them with them; some we get from the mission school in Dunedin. Orphans.” He spoke the last word with meaningful emphasis, and appeared to cast a mocking glance at his father.

Elaine was once again confused. She had never heard of there being orphan children among the Maori. It didn’t match up with their understanding of family. Helen had explained to her that Maori children called every woman of the appropriate generation either “mother” or “grandmother.” The tribe raised the children communally. There was no way it would set orphaned children on the doorstep of a mission school.

Nevertheless, an education at such a school explained Pai’s first-class English and her basic understanding of housekeeping. Elaine would ask the girl later where she had originally come from.

Though strongly influenced by Maori cuisine—it consisted mostly of roasted meat, fish, and sweet potatoes—the food at the Sideblossoms’ table was exceptional. Elaine wondered if it had always been that way or if Zoé oversaw the kitchen and wrote out the menu. She could hardly remember what she had eaten during her first visit. At the time, she’d only had eyes for Thomas, but she had likewise fallen in love with the landscape around Lionel Station, and just found everything heavenly. At the moment, Elaine wondered how she could have been so blind. And not only once, but twice now, with William.

She would never let anything like this ever happen to her again. She would not fall in love again. She…

She was
married
. The realization that there was no way out of her current situation made her stop in the middle of chewing. This was not a nightmare from which someone would rescue her someday. It was immutable reality. There was divorce, of course, but then she would have to have provide serious cause—and she would never be able to bring herself to describe to a judge what Thomas did to her every night. Just the thought of telling someone about it almost made her die of shame. No, divorce was not an option. She just had to learn to live with it. Determined, she swallowed the food in her mouth, despite the fact that it her mouth felt just as dry as earlier. There was wine, at least. Elaine took her glass, but she was careful not to drink too much. She needed a clear head. Callie still needed a place to sleep. Perhaps she could ask Pai, or better still, Rahera. Rahera could take Callie to her brother, and Pita would take care of the dog. And then…
Elaine had to try to recall Daphne O’Rourke’s many tips, other than the one about seeking oblivion in wine. At least for the time being, the last thing she wanted was to become pregnant by such a brute.

In the first month of her marriage, fate was kind to Elaine. Just before the time of month that would put her at greatest risk for pregnancy, the men left to herd the sheep into the highlands. For the ewes, they liked to use the hidden pastures that James McKenzie had discovered. With the sheep, it was a two-day ride. The return trip would take at least a day, and the men might stop to fish or hunt along the way. With a little luck, the critical days would have passed by then.

Elaine did not dare hope for willing abstention on the part of her husband. Thomas slept with her almost every night, and she saw no way of “getting used to it.” She still felt like she was being ripped apart every time he plunged into her. She had long since used up the ointment that Mrs. Gardner had given her, and Elaine had not had a chance to search for the ingredients to make a new one. Whenever Thomas pulled her to him or dug his fingers into her breasts, she was black-and-blue afterward. He was at his worst when she had angered him or not behaved in a “ladylike” manner. He called that “playing games with him” and responded with his idea of play. There were ways of penetrating a woman that Inger had not known about or had kept from Elaine.

Pai regularly reddened when she saw the evidence of Thomas’s mistreatment on Elaine’s body.

“I’m never going to get married!” she once declared categorically. “I can’t lie next to a man. I don’t want to!”

“But is nice,” remarked Rahera with her soft voice. She was a charming girl of roughly fifteen, short and stocky but attractive. “I like already marry man of my tribe. But cannot. Have to work.” Her
countenance was sad. As Elaine had since learned, Pita and Rahera were in no way “ramblers” but belonged to a tribe that dwelled predominantly in the McKenzie Highlands. Unfortunately, their tribe’s chief had his own reasons for wandering the same territory as the legendary rustler. The tribe had come under suspicion when a herd of the Sideblossoms’ best sheep had disappeared. When the animals reemerged a short while later, John held the young Maori boys who were near the herd by chance accountable, knowing that the boys would take flight with their tribe if John informed the constable. Rahera, Pita, and two other youths were now working off their sentence—an interminable sentence that John had determined himself. Elaine knew that the boys’ situation would have turned out more favorably if they had gone before the court, and it was unlikely that Rahera would even have been punished.

“You… have already?” Pai asked, ashamed. “I mean… with a man?” The fact that she had been raised in a mission was obvious. She had never lived among her people and spoke their language only imperfectly.

Rahera smiled. “Oh yes. Named Tamati. Good man. Now works in mine in Greymouth. When free, we will do in
wharenui
. Then man and wife.”

For the first time, Elaine saw the sense in the Maori custom of sleeping together in public before the whole tribe. What would the female elders have had to say if they knew what Thomas did to her every night?

Elaine took advantage of the men’s absence to get a better look around Lionel Station’s stables. That is to say, after only a few days in the house, she was already beginning to go mad with boredom. There was nothing to do in her apartment. She did not do the cooking, and the maids took care of the cleaning. Rahera had no idea how to clean silver or scour floors and seemed to think it all superfluous, and Pai was all the more fastidious as a result. Elaine knew nothing of Pai’s faith, but the mission
school had done a first-rate job of educating perfect English maids. Pai trained Rahera and made sure that she did everything correctly. Elaine only got in the way. Distractions like books or a gramophone were not to be found in the Sideblossom household. Neither father nor son seemed to read much, and Zoé stuck to women’s magazines. Elaine devoured those, but they only came once a month at best, and when they did, she read them within a day.

In the grand salon, however, there was a piano that Zoé didn’t use. When it came to Zoé’s education as a perfect lady, someone had neglected musical training. So Elaine began to play again. She was a little rusty, not having touched her own instrument since the incident with Kura. Here, though, practicing filled up the many empty hours, and it wasn’t long before she was attempting more challenging pieces.

At that moment, however, the path to the stables was clear, and with a happy Callie at her heels, Elaine explored the structures outside. They were extensive, as she’d expected they would be. The horse stables and depot lay directly near the house, similar to Kiward Station. Elaine cast a glance into the clean stalls. Several black horses—along with a bay here and there—whinnied at her. All of them had the small, noble heads of John and Thomas’s riding horses, and their exaggerated reaction to every distraction spoke to their thoroughbred status. Elaine petted a small black stallion that was beating its hooves impatiently against the stall door.

“I know how you feel,” she sighed. “I don’t feel very well today, but tomorrow I’ll go for a ride. Would you like that?”

The little horse snorted, and sniffed her hand and then the riding dress she had just taken out of her dresser at Lionel Station for the first time. Could he discern Banshee’s scent?

Elaine stepped back out into the sunshine. She followed a farm road out to another cluster of barns and stables. There, she ran into Pita and another Maori boy, who were attempting to herd a few rams that had broken off from the group back into a freshly repaired paddock. The sheep were high-spirited youngsters that would no doubt have liked to follow the ewes and stud rams into the highlands, and
they remained unimpressed by Pita’s attempt to tame them. A rascally one even attacked the boy.

At first, Elaine laughed at the little ram from which the shepherds fled. But then her heartbeat quickened. Should she intervene? Callie sat panting and tense beside her. The dog wanted nothing more than to herd these sheep. Her training had been patchwork, though; Elaine had only improvised it. What if it didn’t work? She would never get over her embarrassment.

On the other hand, what did she have to lose? The two Maori boys might tease her, but she could get over that. With a little luck, she could make a good impression, and if the boys mentioned it later, Thomas might see that she was of much more use outside than cooped up in the house.

Elaine whistled piercingly, and Callie shot out of her holding position like a cannonball. The dog threw herself between the boy and the insolent ram, gave a single curt bark, faced the ram head-on, and made it clear that he did not have a choice. The ram spun around immediately. Callie stuck to his heels before turning her attention to the others. Within seconds, she had gathered all six into a herd and gave Elaine a beaming collie look.

Elaine casually approached the paddock’s gate—she did not dare run since that would cause the sheep to scatter. She opened the gate a bit wider and whistled for Callie once more. The sheep trotted into the pen in such an orderly formation that it was as if they had practiced marching in lockstep.