Toward the Sea of Freedom (48 page)

The merchant laughed. “They won’t help you make a sale, either, girl. Honest or not, no one here needs a maid. Maybe the sheep farmers farther inland. Though there aren’t any homes as grand and fine as those in the plains. The farmers were all whalers and seal hunters before. If they need a housecleaner, they take on a Maori girl—she’ll stick around for bed, too, and not make a production of it. Nah, sweet. Look for another town or another job.”

That was discouraging, but Lizzie continued through the town. Kaikoura, however, had only one shop, one smith, one carpenter (who was also the undertaker), and three taverns. In front of one of the taverns, she met a girl, somewhat younger than her and heavily made-up.

“Do you work here?” Lizzie asked. “On, on the street or in a house?”

The girl looked at Lizzie, amazed. She was blonde, her hair put up in a complicated coiffure, her dress too shiny and red for an honest merchant’s daughter. Lizzie, on the other hand, looked exceedingly demure in her neat, dark maid’s uniform.

“In the tavern,” the girl answered. “No one walks the street here. Too cold and wet. Besides, the barkeepers always need new blood. And pay halfway fairly too. Are you looking for work?”

Lizzie nodded. “Yes, but not that kind.”

The girl laughed. “Sure, I hear you. You’re picturing a convent’s kitchen, or do you mean to become a nun yourself? Your dress would suit that. There ain’t any proper convent nearby, alas. Otherwise, I’d already be there. I’m Irish and a good Catholic.”

Lizzie furrowed her brow. She did not know anything about convents, but the girl, doubtless, was teasing her.

“I worked as a housemaid before,” Lizzie said. “And as a milkmaid too.”

“Well at least the stench from the customers won’t scare you off,” the blonde said. “Honestly, sweet, they stink like animals here. Blubber, blood, who knows what all. Whalers aren’t for delicate sensibilities.” She looked at Lizzie appraisingly. “But you ain’t got no delicate sensibility, do you, little sister? Now what is it that tells me you’re not new to the profession?”

Lizzie sighed. So people could see it on her. She had always thought that was the case. “I haven’t done it in a long time,” she said.

The girl waved that away. “You don’t forget how.”

Lizzie bit her lip. “I don’t want to do that anymore.”

The girl snorted. “Sweetheart, I don’t do it because it’s such great fun either. But look around: there’s nothing but this backwater for far and wide. Right behind’re the mountains; a little to the south, Waiopuka; and the whaling station on the coast. That’s where the customers mostly used to come from. But now less and less; they need ships if they want to go after the critters. They anchor here, and we serve the lads. It was nicer with regulars. They would wash up occasionally. What can you do? The Fyfes, who ran the whaling station, now raise sheep too.”

Lizzie grasped at straws. “I heard that on the big sheep farms, well, that there were fine people who might need servants.”

“The Fyfes are old salty dogs. They need good whiskey and the occasional girl, but certainly not to clean. And they’re not big farms, either, around here. The big ones are in the plains. And there are supposed to be rich people’s houses in Christchurch too.”

“I simply can’t go there,” said Lizzie wearily.

“I can’t either. I robbed a customer,” the blonde said. “Wasn’t even my fault. The fellow didn’t want to pay, so I smashed a chair over his head and took off with his wallet. Stupid me, it was the brother of a police officer. Anyway, they’re looking for me. But Christchurch is too pious to make anything there anyway. And Dunedin is worse, full of Calvinists.”

“There has to be something else. I’ll work hard. I know how to fish. Do you think I could make something at one of the whaling stations?”

The blonde shook with laughter. “A girl on a whaling station? I’d like to see you wade around half naked in blubber and blood to butcher the beast. Lands, sweet, you don’t want to do that. You’re cute enough; you’ve got work experience. What do you mean to do, ask around if the fishermen need help with crawfish?”

“Crawfish?”

“Aye, they drag loads of them out of the sea. They taste great too. But I don’t think the fishers’d hire a girl. Even if they take their wives out now and again, the poor, overworked little things. If you’re set on it, maybe one of them will marry you. They’re all crazy for women. Whenever they can scrape the money together, they come to the taverns, and the girl they call upon gets a marriage proposal straight away. But is that what you want?”

Lizzie confessed that it wasn’t. The fishers’ huts looked dilapidated and impoverished. Their wives probably wore themselves to the bone, first at sea with their husbands and then at home, and likely with children waiting for them too. That might please God, but Lizzie’s piety had its limits.

“I’ll think it over,” she told the girl. “What’s your name, anyway?”

“Claudia. And you?”

“Lizzie.”

Another world in which first names sufficed.

She tried her luck with the coffin maker, who told her she was indeed very nice but his customers did not need encouraging anymore. She strolled once more around the fishermen’s huts and then went on to the Maori village.

The Ngai Tahu were friendly, and considerably more open than the tribes on the North Island. Lizzie felt comfortable with them at once, in part because they wore more Western clothing and only a few young people were tattooed. Apparently the Maori on the South Island acclimated more willingly to the customs of the
pakeha
than those on the North Island. Economically, however, things were going badly for the tribe. Many men had worked at the whaling station, always as day laborers. Now that there was less whaling to do, they had no earnings. For the women there was little to do anyway. A few helped on sheep farms, but only occasionally in the barns. As for house servants, the reports of the
pakeha
in town were confirmed: no one had ever taught a Maori to be a butler, gardener, or coachman, let alone a chamber or kitchen maid.

Lizzie stayed the night in the village, which resembled a campsite more than the proper
marae
of the Ngati Pau. It seemed the Ngai Tahu had to abandon their settlement often.

“In the spring, when the stores are low,” one of the tribe members said, “we wander to better hunting grounds in the mountains. If you want, you can come along, but there are hardly any
pakeha
and certainly no large houses.”

Being so close to the sea, the tribes could always feed themselves with fish, but the
pakeha
were competing with them more and more for the fishing grounds. Lizzie was surprised that their response was not like that of the tribes on the North Island, but the Ngai Tahu had a different perspective.

“Before the
pakeha
came, things were actually worse for us,” the women reported. “True, there were fish, but no seeds, no sheep. It is cold in winter. Now we have warmer clothing, we tend our fields, and for a long time, we received work from the whites.”

The connection with the
pakeha
could be seen in the way the tribe lived. They had comforts that were more familiar to Lizzie: the women weaved wool, so there were blankets and mats. Their diet seemed more varied, and they cooked their food in pots and pans purchased from the
pakeha
rather than in earthen ovens or with sticks over the fire. Of course, their geographic situation was also different. Lizzie noticed at once that it was colder here than on the North Island. Surely it was more difficult to make it through the winter.

Lizzie did not want to live at the tribe’s expense for too long. After two days, she gave the women some money, said good-bye, and returned to town.

The tavern in front of which she had met Claudia was called the Green Arrow, and from what Lizzie could tell, it was also the cleanest in Kaikoura. Lizzie entered and asked for work.

Pete Hunter, the stocky barkeeper, didn’t ask for references or her name. He eyed Lizzie briefly, mumbled something, and then pointed her to a room on the second floor.

“You need to keep it clean yourself, do laundry once a week at the Chinese cleaners. If you want to change your sheets more often, you have to wash them yourself.”

Lizzie spent the first hours of her new old life scrubbing the room halfway clean and fighting the fleas.

“Should I lend you a dress?” asked Claudia as they went down to the tavern that evening. “Hunter’ll advance you the money for materials if you want to sew yourself one, but he’ll want it back with interest.”

Lizzie shook her head. She had spent the previous few hours lowering the neckline on her maid’s dress and raising the skirt under the apron so that it was shorter in front and gave a view of her legs. Her face was made-up and her hair coiffed, and she wore her bonnet somewhat askew.

She placed herself sheepishly next to the door of the tavern and curtsied as the first man entered. “May I take the master’s coat?” Lizzie smiled mischievously up at her customer, recognizing the coffin maker.

Lizzie had her first customer.

Kahu Heke sailed north, thinking of the girl he was leaving behind. The first girl who seemed capable of wandering with him between the worlds of the Maori and the
pakeha
. For now, the
pakeha
still held on to her. As for him? Kahu Heke had no answer. Probably, they would elect him chief after his uncle Kuti Haoka. The Ngati Pau respected him. But if he wanted even a chance to win over Lizzie, he would have to become a farmer instead, cutting through all the
tapu
that surrounded a warrior chief, acclimating like the Ngai Tahu, whom he looked down upon. He could bring his worlds closer together for Elizabeth’s sake. In truth, he would only be speeding up a development that was inevitable anyway.

Kahu decided not to bother with Kororareka and negotiating with the whalers anymore. It would be better to learn something about agriculture—perhaps even about what fascinated Lizzie so much: viniculture.

The young Maori smiled grimly as the
Hauwhenua
flew over the waves. If he wanted, once he was chief, he could even get himself crowned king. So far, no one was fighting for the post. To the Maori, the idea of centralized rule was foreign. If someone like Kahu, with his knowledge of
pakeha
culture and his fluent English, applied, everyone would be excited.

In the rush of speed and wind, Kahu gave in to his daydreams. Elizabeth was his queen, and one day, he would take her with him to London. The young Maori saw himself as
kingi
, and he laughed as he pictured Elizabeth curtsying before Victoria and having Prince Albert gallantly kiss her hand. Elizabeth would prove herself worthy of her name, a queen who warmed the hearts of others with her irresistible smile.

Chapter 9

Over the previous few days, Michael and his Maori helpers had freed more than four thousand mostly unwilling ewes and rams from their wool—all the sheep of the farms in the Kaikoura district. It had long since become custom for Michael to hand the Fyffes’ farm over to the Maori girls for a few weeks in the spring and travel from farm to farm with his shearing company. The men earned a considerable additional income doing it, while the girls helped lamb and herd the ewes into the mountains for the summer. Fyffe was the only owner who employed women for that job; the other farms exclusively hired men to work as shepherds.

Now that the sheep were shorn, Michael had money in his pocket and a powerful thirst. A march through the taverns in Kaikoura sounded just about right to him. There would still be something left over to set aside for the voyage back to Ireland.

Michael was saving for his return home, although he was not sure how serious he was about it anymore. Since the letter from Father O’Brien had arrived, his zeal had markedly decreased. After all, he would not be seeing Kathleen now. She was gone. Somewhere in America with that swindling ass, Ian Coltrane.

Michael wondered how, of all the men in Ireland, she could have fallen in with that one; when he thought of his son calling that livestock trader his father, it horrified him. Worse still, all of it had been done with Michael’s money. Ian Coltrane would never ever have been able to pay for passage on his own. And Michael did not believe that Ian loved Kathleen. From what he knew, Ian had kept a girl in Wicklow—a red-haired whore, impudent and stuck-up, the exact opposite of the reserved, gentle Kathleen. And Kathleen could not have loved Ian. Perhaps her parents had forced her to marry him.

Whenever Michael rode alone across the country, he imagined traveling to America and looking for Kathleen. He would flush her out somewhere in New York and knock Ian Coltrane out of her bed. Of course he knew that it would be harder to search New York than all of Ireland. Besides, the normal route to New York led to Australia—where Michael absolutely did not want to go—and then to China. So for now, Michael put off the decision. His savings grew so slowly that he would have to work for years to afford the passage. The whiskey and the blondes in Kaikoura ate up much of what he earned. When Michael’s longing became overwhelming, he would treat himself to a girl, like cute little Claudia from the Green Arrow—and he paid so well that none of the girls ever complained when he called out Kathleen’s name as he climaxed.