Du Rose Sons Page 3

  Hana raised her eyebrows in interest. Legend told that Phoenix Du Rose threw her son off the property and divided the mountain - but it wasn’t true. This was the proof. But the written words hadn’t finished with their final punch.

  ‘Reuben’s boys are becoming out of control and it would be best to remove them from the rest of the whānau. Kane, in particular is showing signs of derangement. That girl has been the undoing of my son’s legacy; she is unhinged and her demons are spreading. He feels he can exercise better control over them away from an audience. Reuben will leave tomorrow with Kane and Neville and set up a makeshift camp on the eastern side of the mountain and return for the girl. Until then, Miriam is left to look after her sister’s bastard. Reuben wishes to adopt her but that is one thing I will not allow. She will never be a Du Rose. Caroline Marsh she will remain, until long after I am dead and in the urupa.’

  Hana dropped the book onto the draining board as sickness enveloped her and she retched into the stainless steel sink without control.

  Chapter 4

  It wasn’t just the fact that Logan almost married Caroline, which affected Hana so badly, or the woman’s destructive influence on their early relationship. It was that Alfred and Miriam had knowingly almost allowed the disaster to happen. Reuben too. It was painful for Logan that Reuben and Caroline conspired to rip him off; organising a wedding that would never happen and using alleged debt from it to secure the flat piece of land on the mountaintop. Forty years of buried grief had made Reuben ruthless and dangerous in his desperation for contact with his son. But it destroyed everything, forcing Logan into legal action and financial ruin for his birth father. Probably all Reuben ever wanted was a face-to-face conversation, a traditional hui in which he would undoubtedly reveal his ace of spades. It was the one time Logan Du Rose had done things by the book and it had taken everyone by surprise.

  Hana ran water into her hand and sipped it, hoping the sickness had finally abated, her hot milk long gone down the plug hole and into the septic tank underneath the driveway. And then she remembered something far worse and the retching began again. A recalled conversation with Leslie returned to her. “I see that that Marsh girl finally got her hooks into a Du Rose! You’d think that poroheahea Kane would ‘ave more sense. She’s been poison to them boys their whole life and now he’s stuck with her. She’ll be thrilled. Hankered after that name as long as she’s ‘ad breath. Wahine kairau!” Leslie spat on the ground with force, realising too late that she’d gobbed on the kitchen floor.

  Guilt seized Hana and she pushed her face further into the sink. “I pushed them together,” she moaned, her voice echoing against the metal. “It’s my fault! But I knew he loved her.” The nausea was Hana’s punishment and she stayed there, trying not to think of gorgeous blonde Caroline dangling the Du Rose men, including Logan, like a spider toying with flies in her copious web. Them and many others.

  “Oh God, please forgive me,” Hana pleaded out loud, laying her sweaty forehead on her arms. Her breaths came heavy and hard won as she pushed the aged diary away from her, no longer caring that it was out in the open air and decaying by the second. It had morphed from a treasured thing to a cursed.

  The obvious fact remained that in finally securing the Du Rose name, Caroline Marsh had unwittingly married her half-brother. Hana felt ill. She knew sleep would never come now. Her cell phone was charging in the enormous lounge and she turned the light on, feeling that same creeping sense of being watched. Drawing all the curtains around the room she grabbed her phone and sent a hurried text to the museum curator. ‘Massive problem with this last diary. I think we need to destroy it! Talk tomorrow.’

  Will was in his late sixties and had been the archivist for the large marae in Ngaruawahia, which was the seat of the royal kīngitanga. Diabetes robbed him of his legs from above the knees and Hana engaged his services to restore the contents of Phoenix Du Rose’s treasures the previous year. When Logan approved her hair brained scheme to display the family heirlooms in an on-site museum, to her surprise he employed the disabled man to set it up. Will moved from Hamilton to the hotel while Hana and Logan were in Europe and occupied a room in one of the motel suites on the property. Logan employed Will’s son as his carer, helping him practically in his quest for normality. It was a blessing for the family following the man’s redundancy at the Hamilton sawmill. Will’s son was an enormous Māori man, terrifying to look at with his ta moko tattoos covering his face, but gentle as a puppy and tender with his father. Logan also gave him work as a groundsman.

  Hana huddled down on her knees next to the wood burner, trying to settle her stomach and draw comfort from the heat. It was two thirty in the morning so Will wouldn’t text back until he started work and the fire was almost spent. She shivered, dropping her phone in surprise as it rang in her hand. Hana wasn’t even given the chance to greet the caller.

  “You destroy an artifact in my care, woman and I’ll whoop your pretty ass all the way back up that mountain you live on!”

  “Why are you up?” Hana felt the sickness of anticipation return to her guts.

  “Because some damn woman started textin’ me!”

  “Oh, sorry.”

  “Na, me an’ me boy’ve been watching the rugby. I’m likin’ this Sky TV thing. Ain’t never been able to watch them international games before. This’n was All Blacks versus Springbok. They’s eatin’ dirt now them green an’ yellas. That’ll teach ‘em.”

  Hana toyed with the idea of politely asking the score but she knew Will wouldn’t tell her. She had never managed to fool him yet and this was not the exception.

  “So, what’s your problem, bro? And don’t bother askin’ bout the rugby cos I know you don’t care. What you wantin’ to destroy?” His voice sounded hoarse down the phone line. He’d probably been shouting at the TV. He had been known to get so excited that he pitched himself out of his wheelchair.

  “It’s this damn diary of Phoenix’s,” Hana tiptoed over and closed the lounge double doors, a ridiculous effort as Logan and her baby were miles away at the other end of the house. “She’s said the most awful things about family members. If this gets out it’ll cause a whole heap of trouble for a lot of people.”

  “History’s like that the world over, girlie. It’s the nature of the thing. Your husband employs me to take care of the truth and that’s what I’m gonna do.”

  “I’ve got two choices here,” Hana tried to be firm with him. “Either I destroy it and nobody is the wiser, or I rip out the offending pages...”

  “Rip out!” Will’s shout echoed in Hana’s ear and she had to hold the phone away and wait for the sound to finish pinging around her ear drum. “Don’t you bloody dare!”

  “You don’t understand. Someone’s married their half-brother without realising. Oh dear God,” a terrible thought occurred to Hana and she sent up a further plea to the God of Heaven. “If they have children, it could be a disaster! Besides which, they’ve broken the law. Oh this is awful,” she flapped. “We have to destroy it.”

  “You return that bloody book to me in one piece tomorrow or I quit! You hear me, madam? I’ll be inspecting every damn page and if I find anything missin’, I’m done here.”

  Hana gulped and nodded, hearing a hiss of exasperation as Will couldn’t see her. “I feel sick,” she said, to no-one in particular and he humphed loudly.

  “You will if you touch that diary!”

  “Ok, ok, we’ll talk tomorrow.” Exhaustion settled on Hana like a shroud.

  “Fine,” Will said with an edge of grumpiness. “Come to the museum and we’ll talk. But remember what I said, girlie. Touch it and we’re done!”

  Will rang off, leaving Hana feeling no better than she had before. “I should have just burned it,” she said to the dying embers. “He wouldn’t have noticed.” But she knew he would. He was an incredible archivist and catalogued everything that passed through his hands. He would have missed it eventually and no amount of blagging would have gotten
Hana out of trouble then.

  Hana hid the tattered diary full of its damaging secrets in her underwear drawer. Some wicked part of her nature acknowledged the innate glee that wrecking Caroline’s new life would bring, but a bigger part urged the need for self-preservation. Whilst Caroline was busy in Christchurch with her new husband, hopefully not producing incestuous two-headed babies, she wasn’t pestering Logan or trying to destroy Hana’s marriage. Hana crawled into the massive four poster bed with her husband, edging across towards his warmth and touching various parts of his satisfyingly hot skin to see if he reacted. He grunted and shifted in bed, until she risked it and put her freezing cold feet on his bare legs. “Geez, woman!” he complained, wakened with a start. “Have you been outside?”

  “No, I can’t sleep.”

  “Well I was managing just fine, but now that I’m disturbed...” Logan put his warm hands up under Hana’s nightshirt and she giggled, her cares and worries temporarily pushed into the background, as her husband set about restoring her body temperature to a little above normal.

  Chapter 5

  Hana’s dream was peculiar, involving a ringing cell phone and some kind of lost cat. It was persistent, intruding on her slumber without mercy, stopping and then starting again for what seemed like hours. She gave up searching for the cat and allowed herself to be pulled from sleep, not surprised to discover the cat was unreal, but astounded to find the ringing phone was. “Yes.”

  Her greeting was abrupt and there was a pause at the other end. Then he let rip, “Where’s that diary? I’ve been waiting for you for hours. Get yourself down here now and let me see it. You’ll be the death of me, girlie.”

  Hana yawned and looked gormlessly at the clock in the right-hand corner of the phone’s screen, taking it away from her ear to do so. She could still hear Will shouting, “Do you ‘ear me?”

  “I was up all night, I wasn’t...”

  “I’m not interested in what you were doing with your evening.” Will sounded beyond agitated. “I saw your man earlier and I’ve got a fair idea from the smile on his face. Get your pretty ass down ‘ere and quick!”

  Hana flopped back on the comfy pillows. It was half past ten in the morning. Logan had put her mobile phone on his pillow next to her, along with a carefully written note in his perfectly scripted left-handed writing.

  ‘Leslie’s got Phoe. You looked so peaceful and our girl was up so I thought I’d leave you. Jack fetched us so the ute up top with you. Come down when you feel like it. Thirty calves in two days, not bad. Only lost two so far.’

  Hana rubbed her eyes, finding them crusty and horrid with sleep. Getting out of bed to get a shower she checked her bedside table. The diary was still buried in the top drawer, snuggled between a pair of sexy red knickers and a friendly old, greying pair that were actually her favourite. She kind of hoped it would have been spirited away in the night somehow, like an answer to prayer. Deliberately delaying her fate, Hana wasted time cleaning the kitchen sink she had spent half an hour barfing into earlier. Then she locked up, started the ute and drove down to the hotel, the diary bouncing carelessly on the passenger seat.

  Will waited for her in the museum. His wheelchair faced the door and his arms were folded across his chest, his face set in a practiced snarl. He held his hand out for the diary straight away. “You look like crap,” he said after he had pulled on a pair of cotton gloves and checked the spine for evidence of ripped pages.

  “Thanks,” Hana said sarcastically. “I told you I was sick.”

  “Not on this, I hope?” He shook the diary at her and inspected the pages all over again. Hana sighed and huffed like a sulky teenager. Will moved his spectacles down his nose and eyed her with amusement. “What’s with you at the moment?”

  Hana hurled herself into one of the elderly chairs along the wall of the museum. Her shoulders slumped and she ran a hand over her tired eyes. “Lots of stuff. I’m fine.” She indicated the diary with a stabbing finger. “That’s not helping! You have no idea how defamatory it is. I want to get rid of it. If you won’t burn it, then at least find somewhere to hide it, where it can’t hurt anyone it relates to.”

  Will wheeled himself over to Hana and put a comforting arm around her shoulders. They spent the next hour discussing the diary and the implications, should its damaging contents ever become widely known.

  “Have you ever stood inside and watched the rain pour down a window?” Will asked. Hana nodded. “A life is like that, see. It runs down fast, finding a way through obstacles, joinin’ with others or runnin’ alone. It leaves the bottom and is gone. The sun dries the window and there’s nothin’ to see anymore, except a faint trail. That’s what people come seekin’; that faint trail. We don’t have the right to wipe it out as though it never happened.”

  Will placed his large, arthritic fingers over Hana’s pale, delicate ones, gripping them gently. A high blush of shame worked its way steadily into her cheeks. Will moved so that his brown eyes were close to Hana’s, forcing her to look at him. “Honey, we’re the guardians of the past, not the judges. And besides, e hara i te mea, he kotahi tangata nāna i whakaara i tō pō.”

  “What does that mean?” Hana asked, irritated by the old man’s lapse into his native tongue. Will smiled sadly and drew his gnarled hand across his mouth. “Listen up good girlie, it means this: It was not one man alone who was awake in the dark times.” At Hana’s still obvious confusion he explained, “Never take one viewpoint for history; it’s dangerous. There’s always more than one way of seeing the past.” He waved the tattered diary under Hana’s nose. A small section of the fabric spine fell off and fluttered into his lap. Hana contemplated pointing it out, wanting the old man to know she hadn’t done it - he had. But her motivation was childish and she kept quiet. “I can restrict this for seventy years, or until everyone involved is dead. I’ll seal it and lodge it somewhere, but I ain’t destroying it, my love. It’s not how you safeguard history and youse know that.”

  Will bobbed his head as he touched Hana’s arm lightly. His hair was thinning on his brown head and he had lost weight since moving up to the hotel. Getting to work for him involved great physical activity, wheeling himself down the road and up the ramp into the museum entrance. It had forced him to get busy and his zest for life was visibly increased. His wrinkled hands reminded Hana of her father’s, thousands of miles away in England. She missed him and the sensation bit with unexpected force, stealing the colour from her cheeks as she remembered the tearful goodbye at Heathrow Airport. Her fingers strayed involuntarily to her stomach, wondering if her child would ever meet his Scots grandfather and when she looked up, Will’s eyes watched her with a knowing expression.

  A slight smile played on his dark lips and Hana’s face impeached him, begging him not to ask. The elderly man respected her plea and didn’t refer to his opportunist’s knowledge. “You promise you’ll lock it up safe? Nobody will see it.” Hana stood up feeling strangely light headed.

  “I promise,” Will assured her. “As long as youse remember one thing, little one. We all comes to a point where we crave the route home to us roots. Don’t matter how old we get, life has a beginnin’ and an end and them’s what can’t see the whole story feels permanently lost. One day, maybe long after I’m gone, you might have to hand this book over to them’s what comes lookin’ because it’s a witness statement of their life. It’s their route map home. As long as youse never lose sight of that, youse gonna know when that time is.”

  Hana stumbled from the museum feeling stressed and ill. She roamed the hotel searching for her daughter and husband. Logan came to his own conclusions concerning his failed wedding to Caroline Marsh, believing the whole thing to be a sham. Hana now knew for sure that he’d been played by a ruthless Reuben Du Rose, but perhaps so had Caroline. The other woman had genuinely loved Logan in her own sick, controlling way. She possibly had no clue that Reuben would stop the marriage somehow. For whatever else Reuben was guilty of, the diaries made it clear;
he would abide by his mother’s wishes, until time immemorial.

  As Hana searched the family areas for her lover and child, Miriam Du Rose’s words clanged forcefully in her mind, spoken on Hana’s wedding night when they were alone together in the kitchen. “Keep him away from her. Promise me?”

  Logan and Caroline. Not just lovers, but cousins.

  Chapter 6

  Hana didn’t find Logan or Phoenix in the busy hotel and her travels took her down to the stable yard behind the main building. The deaf stable manager, Jack supervised the farrier as he tried to trim the feet of one of the nastiest brood mares. Rawhiti, the stable lad, attempted to occupy her as she fought to take lumps out of the farrier’s bent backside. Jack was in his nineties, bent over and wizened by age but he missed nothing. Hana closed the gate after her and walked towards them, feeling an odd sensation as her child kicked out at her bladder. Please stop, she implored the child in her belly. I need to tell your daddy about you before you start doing somersaults and making it any more obvious!

  The thought of confessing to Logan and his subsequent anger at her subterfuge was enough to make Hana come over all hot and bothered despite the chill in the air. She flapped at her face and hung back, not wanting to disturb the men at their unpredictable work. Jack had a good hold on the huge white mare in his care. Nothing would ever get past him. But Rawhiti was not so sure of himself. A young man in his twenties, he loved horses and sought Jack’s vast ninety year experience with an insatiable hunger, but he struggled with the deaf-man’s communication style and so missed the significant and hastily grunted warning.

  Rawhiti’s temperamental brood mare decided she’d had enough of being messed around with. The expensive Appaloosa reared up on her back legs and aimed a well-placed kick at Rawhiti’s upturned face with a neatly trimmed front hoof. He ducked and the lead rope ran painfully through his fingers, removing skin with each rutted edge that passed through. The farrier went sprawling face first on the cobbled surface and the mare was loose. Stamping and snorting, her eyes wide in fury and her nostrils splayed open like velvet blow holes, she made a beeline for Hana and the closed gate.