The Colour (6 page)

Toby and Dorothy Orchard built a house of surprising beauty out of the materials to hand: totara pine from the bush, slate from the gullies, lime wash from a hand-hewn quarry. Saplings of oak and maple, willow and poplar had been hauled across the miles of flat and planted in the wet seasons, and had flourished, and the earth around Orchard House had become cool and shady and kingfishers nested there.

Inside, the place was grander and more comfortable than its lime-washed wooden exterior suggested. The stone fireplaces, in which scented apple wood was burned, had been carved with rough approximations of the Orchard family crest. All Toby and Dorothy's wedding gifts – mahogany dressers and dressing-mirrors, Caroline day-beds and candle sconces, Regency silverware and fine French and German porcelain – had endured the same kind of journey as Lilian Blackstone's ill-fated tea-service and survived to embellish the large rooms. A servant whose name was Jane, but whom the Orchards idiosyncratically addressed as Janet – perhaps to make her particular to them? – kept things polished and neat. At Christmas time, Dorothy Orchard decorated the walls with ferns and made honey-coloured candles from beeswax, while Toby ordered geese to be killed and plucked.

‘Our world,' Dorothy would whisper as, one by one, she lit the Christmas candles. ‘Our world, our world, our
new
world.'

They were not alone in it. They had a son called Edwin, whom they had almost lost to a different world.

In the summer of 1856, Edwin Orchard had been lying in his rushwork cradle on the verandah of Orchard House. A hot, dry wind was blowing, bending the newly planted saplings, tugging at the sheets on the washing line and sending sudden swirls of dust into the air. Baby Edwin's Maori nurse, Pare, was watching over the cradle, but, little by little, her attention wandered from it and went towards the dust and the suffering trees. It seemed to Pare that the invisible god of the forest was close by and she was unable to stop herself from shivering. She felt light-headed, confused, as though the wind had entered her skull. She blinked and rubbed her eyes. The sun glinted on a nail at the verandah's edge and Pare was staring at this shining nail when she saw, at the edge of her vision, a green creature come scuttling towards her.

Pare screamed. She stood up, and, as though flayed by the wind, she went flying into the house, with Edwin in his cradle quite forgotten. She shut herself in the kitchen, stuffing towels into the crack between the door and the floor. Her mind filled with visions of the ng
ā
rara, the giant hot-tongued reptile which the Maoris told stories about and which had often crept into her dreams. She imagined this creature following her into the house and pinioning her beneath him and she knew that to be raped by the ng
ā
rara was the most terrible fate a woman could suffer.

Pare put her face in her hands. She could still hear the violence of the wind. It rattled the kitchen shutters and howled in the rafters overhead. And she thought now that this what the wind had heralded – the coming of the ng
ā
rara to the Orchard Run. She could not go back on to the verandah. She would have called for Toby Orchard to come and kill the ng
ā
rara with one of his shotguns, but she knew that he was out on the flats, miles away. Nor were Dorothy and Janet in the house, but out in Dorothy's carriage, taking oatcakes and tomato chutney to the vicar at Rangiora. Pare didn't know what she could do except to stay locked in the kitchen until somebody came home and saved her.

Meanwhile, the wind altered its direction just enough to begin to rock baby Edwin's cradle. Edwin Orchard always swore that he could remember this, the sudden marvellous see-sawing of the rush cradle in the southerly wind. And then, like a ng
ā
rara picking up a human girl, the wind scooped him up – baby and cradle and little embroidered coverlet – and hurled him off the verandah and turned him upside-down on to the parched front lawn.

He could never remember this momentary flight of his, nor his landing, nor the time that followed. He lay without moving for almost an hour, until Dorothy and Janet found him, with his little head lying in the dust. Dorothy wrapped him in her skirts and carried him inside the house, where Pare was locked in the kitchen. Dorothy could feel Edwin's heart still beating, but he wouldn't move nor open his eyes.

She laid him in her bed. Janet was sent back to Rangiora to fetch Dr Pettifer. He told Dorothy that none of Edwin's limbs was broken but that he couldn't say whether the baby would live or die. ‘He is elsewhere,' was all he could pronounce, ‘he has gone away from the here-and-now and may never return.'

That evening, Toby Orchard conducted a lizard hunt. In his fury and sorrow at what had happened, he shot at everything that moved or rustled within thirty yards of the house. He showed Pare the bloodied remains of a green gecko. Then he sent her away. He let her take water and food and a little money in her bundle of possessions, but he felt no mercy for her. He didn't care where she went or what became of her. He would have liked to have given her a whipping.

Edwin Orchard woke up five days later.

For a year, he seemed weakened by what had happened, his face pale and his eyes peculiarly large. But then he started to become like any other boy, except that he always wanted to be rocked and never grew out of it. At eight years old, he would still climb on to his mother's knee and say: ‘Rock me, Mama. Rock me like the wind.'

II

When the snow melted in the warm winter sunshine that succeeded it, it was to the Orchard Run that Harriet Blackstone travelled.

She and Joseph had looked at what had happened – the loss of Beauty and of almost all their hens, the donkey grown thin and tormented by coughing, the tin roof of the Cob House buckled and leaking – and seen their own responsibility in these disasters, their own ignorance.

‘We're fools,' said Joseph. ‘We're blunderers. We're geese.'

He thought in his panic and pessimism that they wouldn't survive the winter. It was Lilian, with her belief that only the well-to-do could succeed in the world, who suggested the journey to Orchard House. Drying Beauty's tartan coat by the range, so that it could be put on to the suffering donkey, she sniffed and said: ‘The only people who will set you straight are the Orchards. You will have to go cap-in-hand to them.'

Cap-in-hand? Joseph thought that all of that had been left behind in England. He'd seen how the squires of Norfolk had looked down on his father, the livestock auctioneer, and how few of them had bothered to attend his funeral or even send a condolence letter. He rounded on Lilian and snapped: ‘I am never again going
cap-in-hand
to any living soul!'

‘Well,' retorted Lilian. ‘Then you are more of a fool than I took you for.
Wulla
.'

That night, in their calico room, Harriet took Joseph in her arms. She said she had always wanted to visit the Orchards so that she could see what grew in their vegetable plot and learn how they irrigated it in summer. She reminded Joseph that Dorothy Orchard, virtually alone in a world of men, was a woman who might enjoy discussing with her how to make a carrot cake or poach an eel.

It was a long time before Joseph said anything. On the edge of sleep, he muttered: ‘You are not travelling all those miles alone.'

‘Yes I am, my dear,' replied Harriet, wide awake. ‘The donkey and I will go at a very slow trot, taking the cart so that I can return with some milk. We shall rest there for a day and a night, or a little longer. I will see what has been planted on the edge of the Orchards' pond.'

She travelled almost due south. When she reached the Ashley River, she stopped and stared at the hectic, jade-green water. A raft made of kanuka trunks, worked with ropes and pulleys, took carts and passengers across the Ashley, and this contraption was waiting there, under the charge of a ferryman, chewing tobacco and spitting into the water.

The ferryman saw Harriet hesitating. ‘Bring him on, Miss! Bring him on!' he shouted. So Harriet tried to lead the terrified donkey to the water's edge, where the raft fretted at its mooring. But the donkey wouldn't go on. He attempted to rear up between the shafts of the cart. He brayed to the sky.

‘Cover his head!' yelled the ferryman. So Harriet took off her cloak and tied it round the animal's face and thought that in this way he would go on, but blind as he was, he could feel the cold of the river and the tilt of the raft and again he tried to rear up and the cart tipped and almost fell and the ferryman swore and one of the shafts slammed into Harriet's elbow.

Trying not to cry out with pain, Harriet turned the donkey and led him in a circle on the dry bank, stroking his neck under the cloak and trying to soothe him with human words. He started coughing and she felt him shivering and some of his fear passed into her and she began to feel cold, but she had to bring him back to the river and this time the ferryman loped off the raft and helped her to pull the animal on, keeping his head low so that he wouldn't rear and trying all the while to steady the cart.

And so the donkey had a footing at last and Harriet held tight to the animal's neck, while the ferryman, always chewing, with his jaw muscles moving and twitching, tugged on the pulleys and the raft floated out into the surging river.

Harriet saw long-legged birds land on the further bank and stare at the approaching apparition. And she thought how, if everything capsized and all of them were drowned, the accident would go unregarded, except by birds she couldn't even name, and she said a prayer that she wouldn't die here, because she knew that her future life would contain wonders and she wanted to remain alive to see them.

The ferryman swore again as the rope tightened on its opposite mooring and burned his blistered hands. Harriet could see the water becoming shallow, and lifted her head when the birds flapped clumsily away.

The raft was nudging the bank now. It was tied up and Harriet coaxed the donkey on to the shingle and uncovered its head and then put on her cloak and pulled it round her. She rested for a few moments and ate some of the dried fruit she'd brought for the journey and let the donkey graze on a patch of straggly grass. She waited until her heart was still again before going on.

She arrived at Orchard House as dusk was falling. Eight-year-old Edwin, who had made his own house in a titoki tree, was the first person to see her, this stranger driving a donkey cart and the animal's head drooping from weariness, and he climbed down and ran to bring her in.

‘Mama,' he said, as he escorted her into the sitting-room, where Dorothy was doing her household accounts, ‘this is Mrs Blackstone and her hands are very cold.'

Dorothy Orchard looked up at Harriet, who was struggling to pile her brown hair back into the neat knot from which it had escaped, and said: ‘Ah. Oh yes, what a nuisance long hair is in this country! What I advise is, cut it off. I broke my arm on a ride and could not, could not dress my hair, and so I gave Toby the scissors and . . . oh but my goodness yes, your hands are frozen solid. Come to the fireside. And Edwin, take Mrs Blackstone's horse to the stables, dearest, and give him some oats.'

‘It's a donkey, Mama,' said Edwin.

‘Oh, a donkey. Well, take the donkey then, sweet boy. You rode a long way on the donkey, Mrs Blackstone?'

‘No. There's a little cart . . .'

‘You crossed the Ashley?'

‘Yes.'

‘And you were not swirled away? They pretend that raft of theirs is safe, but of course there have been drownings. Now come along to the fire and I will call our maid, Janet, and she will bring us some brandy wine.'

Harriet looked at Dorothy Orchard, whose hair was indeed cut short and stuck out at a rebellious angle from the nape of her neck. Her face was wide and square and slightly flat, as though her jawbone were a sail, set squarely to the wind, but her eyes were large and beautiful. When Harriet began apologising for arriving unannounced, Dorothy said: ‘You were not unannounced. That is to say, we heard from our cadet, from whom you bought your mutton, that you had built a house near the Okuku and that you were high up and I said to Toby when the snow came: “I think we shall see the Blackstones as soon as there is a melt”. So I was not wrong, except that you came alone.'

She went to the door, then, and began calling to the maid: ‘Janet! Janet!' then turned to Harriet and whispered: ‘Her name is Jane, but we never call her that. It is very peculiar of us.'

Harriet smiled at Dorothy. Then she allowed herself to look round the large room. In its degree of spaciousness and comfort, it reminded her of places where she'd worked as a governess, places which she had never expected to see again once she'd set sail for New Zealand. She wondered how long it had taken the Orchards to create a room like this, with heavy curtains at the windows and a fine gilt mirror above the fireplace and newspapers folded in a rack.

‘Now,' said Dorothy to Janet, who had come silently in, ‘bring some brandy wine and three glasses, and some milk for Edwin, then make up a bed for Mrs Blackstone, and . . . what are we to eat for supper?'

‘Pigeon pie,' said Janet.

‘Very well. Make sure there is enough for us all.' Then she turned to Harriet as Janet slipped away. ‘Troublesome to shoot, the pigeon,' she said. ‘Flight like a spinning top. But Toby could shoot a flea. Sit down, Mrs Blackstone. Put your feet on this little stool and warm them.'

The pie was large and cumbersome. A whole flock of large pigeons seemed to fill it up, clustering together in a red gravy.

Harriet, yawning with hunger, noticed that Toby Orchard's enormous hands cut the pastry with surprising delicacy, as though he knew he had been put on earth to be the steward of everything physical in the world, whether these things were flying about, or growing at a creek's edge, or dead in a pie. She watched him as he cut the first triangle of pastry and laid it on top of the pie and scooped up the spicy meat with a heavy spoon, then transferred the pastry to the brimming plate that he handed her. Compared to Joseph, Toby Orchard was a giant. His hair and beard were yellow and wild and his face had a high colour, as though he had just run a race or fought with a tiger. His clothes were noisy as he moved inside them.