Du Rose Sons Page 2

  The roof of the house was constructed from dark brown concrete tile which muffled the sound of the driving rain that often came at night. Dark brick and tinted windows protected the interior from the baking sun, although Hana had missed this year’s New Zealand summer, swapping it for an English winter. Inside, the house was full of wide open spaces and skylights which allowed plenty of light in. Hana loved it.

  In the noisy bushland outside the gate, an old tui bird cackled and trilled high up in the branches of the kauri. Hana shielded her eyes with her hand and stared up through the canopy, blinded by sunlight as the winter clouds parted and dazzling rays peeked through. Hana’s eyes watered and she stepped back involuntarily, staggering over a tree root. Strong hands gripped her upper arms and through her sun-induced-tears, Hana saw Leslie’s hazy silhouette.

  “Careful girl!” she exclaimed, supporting Hana’s slight frame as the younger woman mopped at her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater. “Please tell me what’s wrong?” The old lady’s voice sounded agonised as she shook Hana slightly, her fingers digging into the delicate flesh and feeling bone.

  Hana exhaled heavily. “I’m pregnant!”

  Leslie’s mouth dropped, giving her the appearance of a gaping trout and she let go of Hana abruptly. “Pregnant, again?”

  Anger filled Hana’s throat as her long-buried redheaded temper flared unexpectedly at her mother-in-law’s reaction. “Yes, again! Pregnant at forty-seven. Don’t you think I know how disgusting everyone will find it? I’m a grandmother and I’m expecting a baby. It’s hideous, I’m hideous!”

  Hana put both hands over her face and felt hot tears course down her cheeks. How could I say that? Is that really what I think? Guilt compounded her misery and she redirected her anger at herself. She had made it sound as though she didn’t want her baby, when in reality it was fear that consumed her. Hana had known for weeks what was wrong. Visiting her grown up son in Hamilton on her return from overseas, she called in on her old doctor on the off chance, hoping to find medication for the niggling stomach upset that didn’t seem to want to go away. “I think I caught something when we were in Paris,” she said, blissfully ignorant.

  “You certainly did!” he laughed, holding up the vibrant yellow urine sample and waving the tell-tale stick at her.

  Leslie’s arms were comfortingly strong as she wrapped them around Hana and the younger woman sighed and leaned into her. “Don’t you ever say that about yourself!” Leslie chided. “You’re beautiful and if I hear you call yourself hideous again, I will beat your ass all the way down that driveway to the bottom of the mountain and back up again!” The old lady sounded fierce and Hana didn’t doubt she meant every word. “Logan must be thrilled!” she said, adding another hefty squeeze. “No wonder he was so tender with youse this morning, carrying you up the stairs and all...” Her voice tailed off at the look on Hana’s face.

  “Don’t start! I keep meaning to tell him and then something else happens. Why do you think I came down to the hotel this morning? He left so early and I thought I might catch him at morning tea and then the window broke.”

  “He doesn’t know?” Leslie looked and sounded appalled. “Well you better get a move on girlie. He ain’t gonna be too happy when you’ve got a belly out here and...” Her jaw dropped again as she seized Hana’s over large sweater hem in both hands and pulled upwards, ignoring the hands that tried to slap hers. “Oh good Lord! You do have a belly out here! How pregnant are you girl?”

  “Mind your own business!” Hana’s retort was sharp as she wrenched the material out of Leslie’s hands and hauled it back over her protruding stomach. Her stretching skin felt taut and paper thin under her shaking fingers.

  “How does your husband not notice a belly like that? Him what’s all doey eyed over you.”

  “Well you didn’t notice when I had to strip off to my underwear.” Hana stuck her nose in the air triumphantly.

  “I was more worried about all the glass over you, girlie. I weren’t checking you out. But your husband can’t keep his eyes off you. I dunno how he’s missed that one right under his kanekane.”

  “I distract him,” Hana admitted, the coyness of her face disappearing back under the mask of rage as Leslie chuckled wickedly.

  “Obviously!”

  Hana squared her shoulders and tried to regain her composure, strutting back up her driveway at speed. She could hear her mother-in-law wheezing as her blancmange body struggled to keep up. Back at the car, Hana rounded on her, “I’ll put Phoe to bed and then you can take the truck back down to the hotel. I’ll text Logan and ask him to bring it back up later on.”

  “You ain’t getting rid of me that fast, young lady. Not unless you want me to get on the radio and send your husband straight up here. I’ll put my moko to bed and you put the jug on. I’m gonna need a strong coffee in front of me for the details of this one!”

  Phoenix’s dark curls bobbed on her head as she lay sprawled over Leslie’s shoulder. The septuagenarian’s buttocks wobbled from side to side on her meaty legs as she negotiated the wide hallway down to the little girl’s room. Hana stood in the kitchen on the other side of the house and watched the aqua water moving around in the distant seascape. There wasn’t an ounce of blood between Leslie and Phoenix and yet the woman had adopted her as her own grandchild from the start, fiercely coveting time with the baby. Logan’s own mother had died the night before Phoenix made her traumatic entrance into the world, birthed under the old kauri tree at the top of the drive, early but determined to thrive. Miriam Du Rose had walked into a house fire deliberately, intending to die with her lover, Reuben Du Rose, Logan’s birth father. Her death was a terrible shock, not least to her husband of almost fifty years, Alfred, but also to Logan, who had no idea that his uncle was his father.

  Leslie humphed as she came into the enormous room and bustled over to the kettle. “You didn’t even fill it up,” she chuntered at Hana but the other woman remained lost in her own thoughts.

  “Sorry.”

  Leslie fiddled around with the kettle and found some mugs, preparing the drinks wordlessly, perhaps understanding that Hana was miles away with her problems. Plonking the steaming drinks down on the centre island, she seized Hana’s arm and forced her to sit down on one of the fancy bar stools lined up underneath the counter. Hana sat obediently but pushed the coffee mug away from her, pulling a face. Leslie smirked. “So obviously, you must be just inside the first trimester, seeing as you threw up at the house and can’t drink coffee,” Leslie looked pleased with her deductions. “How come you’re showing so big though?”

  Hana pulled a face and ran her hand over her eyes. Leslie sipped her drink and Hana could almost hear her brain calculating. “So when did you fall pregnant then? When you got home?”

  Hana shook her head. “No. It happened in Paris. I know when it was.”

  Leslie’s aged face appeared even more wrinkled as she screwed it up to concentrate. “But you were in Paris in April and it’s almost the end of July. That can’t be right. You’re not...three months gone, are you?”

  “Worse,” Hana let out a huge sigh. “I’m getting on for four and I still haven’t told my husband.”

  Leslie’s eyes bugged in her head and then she tried to disguise her misgivings, “Aw honey, what’s the worst he can say?”

  Chapter 3

  Calving began early and Logan arrived home late, falling into bed after a shower. Hana traced a lazy finger down his damp skin and he enclosed her hand in his before his breathing deepened and he slid into an exhausted sleep. Unable to settle, Hana got up and went to the kitchen, making hot milk for herself and getting her treasured book out of the change bag housing Phoenix’s things.

  Its hard backed, fabric cover was brown and aged and the pages inside were yellowed and speckled with mildew. Hana stroked the diary, one of many, written by Logan’s paternal grandmother - the original Phoenix Du Rose. A box of objects the previous summer had been dropped off by the marae elder, left w
ith his family for safekeeping by the old lady, only months before her unexpected death. He had held onto them for more than forty years, waiting for the right moment. “Keep them,” she told the kaumatua, “keep them until the mountain is joined and only then, pass them onto my mokopuna, Logan.”

  The later diaries made hard reading, detailing the argument between her two sons, Alfred and Reuben. The older brother stole Reuben’s sweetheart after a spat between the soul-mates and Reuben had been devastated. Miriam had produced three children for Alfred, but her youngest belonged to Reuben. Phoenix had divided the mountain, giving a smaller share to the disgraced son who was widowed with young children of his own, condemning them to scratch a living away from the homestead. She bitterly regretted her actions, missing her favoured son dreadfully, but couldn’t reverse her decision. So she put her energies into Logan, showering him with everything that Reuben should have had, instructing him in Māori lore, tikanga and kawa and instilling in him a bond with the land which would never be broken. And then she died, unexpectedly and much too early. Logan was there with her on the site of the house he now slept in, unable to prevent her death, sitting with her until it was past dark and knowing in his five year old head - she wouldn’t wake up.

  While Alfred’s lack of business sense on one side of the mountain ruined a thriving family business, Reuben’s keen mind and skilled accounting went to waste, decimating his land without the will to make it into anything special. After his death in the fire, accumulated debt made his sons unable to keep the property and when Nev, the oldest of Reuben’s offspring offered it to Logan, he had taken it, keeping his half-brother on as manager. The land had joined and before the ink was even dry on the documents, the kaumatua had come and offloaded his burden in the shape of six extremely large and ratty cardboard boxes.

  This diary was dated April 1968 and spoke of a time when Phoenix Du Rose was queen of all she surveyed. Despite the fabled Du Rose curse that had killed her husband, she built her farm into the biggest employer in the area. The locals bitched about the family in the township, but were happy to take her cash to pay their bills.

  As the hot milk went to war with Hana’s indigestion, she donned a pair of white cotton gloves and began to read. Will, the museum curator at the hotel would be cross with her if he had seen Hana in the family room, touching the elderly artifact without gloves. Hana cringed as she opened the diary and glass tinkled down onto the worktop. The spine made a horrid cracking sound as Hana tapped it lightly to make the rest fall out. “Sorry, Will,” she whispered, leafing through to find her place and losing herself in Phoenix’s memories.

  The next page decried the behaviour of Reuben’s late wife. Reuben and Alfred had married sisters from the wider whānau, continuing the mess of interbreeding and bad genetics.

  ‘Antoinette is a ridiculous girl. Does she think we are all such fools that we don’t know what she’s been doing? Her father is perfectly well. I saw him in Ngaruawahia last week at the marae, yet Reuben tells me his wife is away taking care of her dying father. Miriam knows nothing of his ‘illness’ and yet, she would be the first to know. She went strangely quiet when I asked her about her sister’s return.

  The blonde drover is gone, so at least their affair is at an end. Reuben hit him so hard, his head left a notch in the doorframe. It set the disease off in Reuben’s fingers and will be a while before he is able to use his left hand. Foolish boy. It was lucky he didn’t kill him but the man left soon after, JD said. It wouldn’t surprise me if they had killed him and buried the body.’

  Hana’s jaw went slack and then she closed it again. Nothing about the Du Roses would surprise her. She smoothed her glove over the black ink. “Who’s JD, Phoenix?” she asked the dead writer. JD had been mentioned numerous times before. “Who is your mysterious man?” It was clear from her writing that he was a trusted confidante of Phoenix Du Rose. The diary went on to detail herd and dairy prices and things that didn’t interest Hana in the slightest. The family had introduced the Charolaise cattle and ventured into raising beef at the beginning of the 70’s. The creamy white beasts roamed the mountainsides, prime purebred after forty years of careful breeding. They were shaggy coated and muscular, many of the females sold internationally as breeding dams.

  What Hana really loved about reading the diaries, was the history of the family into which her daughter had been born, adding a context to the sprawling land and lives lived on it over almost two centuries. Phoenix Du Rose was a hard woman, mainly through necessity but also genetics. At her rangatira father’s death, a brooch disappeared from his coffin, thought to have been stolen by her wayward, drunkard husband, Henri. When Henri died a few months later of his haemophilia, legends of the Du Rose Curse were born, involving tales of divine retribution for the theft of the tapu object. But Phoenix was the thief, keeping the brooch hidden from the questing hands of her sister. The diary had revealed her guilty sixty year secret - but sadly not the brooch.

  Hana yawned and covered her mouth, her well-bred English manners winning through even though nobody else saw. The hair prickled at the back of her neck like a ghostly hand stroking her and Hana swung round on her stool, feeling as though she was being watched. The house was so far from the hotel and even further from the township, she and Logan never closed the curtains, not even in their bedroom. The prickling feeling persisted and she got off her stool and went to the window. Blackness stared back at her, but it unnerved Hana enough to drop the blinds over the sink and pull the drapes across the ranch slider. She shivered, wondering whether to wake Logan, but he was exhausted and would be up before light if calving had started already.

  Turning back to the diary, Hana immersed herself in a tale which went back more than forty years. There were more herd prices, physical logs of profits as though Phoenix had used the diary as an account book and then came an interesting entry.

  ‘Reuben won’t talk to me about it. He has allowed his unfaithful wife to just come home as though nothing happened. Women from the Ngapuhi tribe at the sale yards yesterday told me where she’s been; hiding up north until delivered of her pakeha spawn. It’s not that she’s borne a white-man’s child that has made me angry, but she is married to my son! They say the child is so white haired she cannot possibly be Reuben’s. He angers me with his indifference. I don’t understand.’

  “But you will.” Hana stroked the pages sadly. Reuben’s affair with Miriam had stretched decades. It was a wonder poor Alfred had managed to father any children at all with his own wife and a miracle that Logan was the only one belonging to his brother. Hana pondered the identity of the white haired child or where she was now. A dawning realisation began in her breast, curdling the milk in her stomach and reviving the mild morning sickness she had mistaken as a bug. Hana took the book over to the sink, knowing she was going to retch but not wanting to stop reading.

  Nothing. The pages rambled on about local people, the staple gossip of the township documented by an intelligent and literate woman, whose skill with the pen had increased visibly over the years from illiterate to gifted. Jack, the deaf stable manager had taught Phoenix to read and write - or so the rumours said. The earliest writings had been almost unintelligible and fraught with error.

  Hana turned the pages, doing her best not to damage them. The gloves frustrated her and she removed them, hoping Will wouldn’t somehow know she had handled the artifact with her bare hands. Towards the end of the book and into 1970 came two revelations, bisected by more numbers and accounts. Hana had been dreading the first, but expected at some point to come across the second. It was about Logan. In historical time, Logan’s conception had eclipsed the first disaster but for Hana, the first was far more damaging now, in real time.

  ‘Antoinette’s bastard has arrived. My father would be turning in the urupa. The northern tribe cannot control her. She is demon possessed. She has hair the colour of morning frost and Reuben has allowed her to stay! My son is a fool and I have told him so. I cannot look at the child.
She vexes Reuben’s boys to distraction and is artful and wicked, even though she is only five years old. She has ruin in her soul.’

  Hana began to skim read, not finding what she wanted, frustration burning as her fingers turned the pages.

  ‘I could kill him! I knew he was being untrue. Miriam has the makings of a pregnancy she has been at pains to hide and Alfred has been gone for months. Reuben looked like a whipped dog since Antoinette’s death and I had thought it was grief, in addition to being left to care for the demon child. It is guilt. My sons have outdone themselves this time. Why must they carry this tragedy forward? Miriam’s child is Reuben’s and I feel a fool. Only last month, I convinced Alfred to return home and save his marriage. He is due this week, once he has finished up working for my sister’s family. This disaster will carry forward through the generations and we will be damned.’

  Hana skimmed. This was old news and not what she was looking for. And then she found it.

  ‘23rd March 1971

  It is my own fault. I should have anticipated this with us all residing in one house. Miriam’s boy child is the image of his father and to my shame, I favour him above the others. The woman has been low in spirits since the birth, which is little wonder with what is happening around her. She is tearful and I fear for her mind. There was a fight today when Alfred walked in and discovered his brother cradling the baby. He attacked him even though Reuben was holding the child. The mother was bereft. Reuben has agreed to leave the property and take his family with him. We have no choice and we rode up to the high point to work it out. I am devastated.’