Frank Hardy, the one-time Sergeant Hardy of Her Majesty’s 57th Regiment, sat on the steps of the Royal Hotel watching two men struggling through the mud of the Square towards him. He was smoking a Sweet Three, a habit he’d picked up in Crimea, and he was almost out, with no chance of getting his hands on another packet. He could look for some up in Napier when he was up there in his Royal Mail coach, but the turnaround time was brief – barely enough time to change the team and ready the new pair for the return to Palmerston. Maybe he could persuade someone to bring some tobacco and papers over from Foxton and he could start rolling his own. But he preferred the ready-mades; the roll-your-owns left nasty flakes stuck in his beard.
It started to drizzle. He pulled off his blue forage cap, ran his fingers through his dark hair and put his cap back on more firmly. He was bored with his life; the same thing every day, with no action. Once he’d been a soldier, a Die Hard, fighting his way through the Crimea and India. Now he was trapped in a country that was becoming more like his tranquil English birthplace every day, and in Palmerston, population 800 people, mostly men, mostly Scandinavians, with a few stolid, unappealing women, and even those married. What he wouldn’t do to see just one good-looking woman pass by on the street.
He could see the two men approaching across the Square better now, and he thought they might be Scandies—Yaya the Māori called them, because of the way they spoke. He dropped the butt of his cigarette and ground it into the mud with the heel of his Hessian boot. As the men slogged nearer through the mud, staring at him now, he picked a flake of tobacco from his beard and wondered if they were coming to talk to him. Some business, perhaps?
Life was exciting back in ‘66 when he first arrived in New Zealand, with the Taranaki Land Wars at their worst and wild-eyed Hauhau fanatics throwing themselves at the British Troops, the colonists and the loyal Māori tribes who fought beside them. His regiment had set up camp along the Tangahoe River, near Patea. To the west, the massive white-capped mountain, with its perfect cone shape, soared above the trees. To the south, war chants accompanied smoke rising from Hauhau villages. He’d been longing for battle—it was what he lived for. But things had not gone well, and he’d cashiered out after Otauto and the pursuit that had followed.
He looked around the Square, a mud-covered two-acre field passing for a town square. Why was he here, of all places? He could move, he supposed. Maybe Napier - some good land up there. He’d find himself a shepherd, and a wife, if he could find the right woman. But the idea bored him before it was fully formed. There were no attractive, interesting women in the entire country and he could never be a farmer, with or without the help of a shepherd. He would die of boredom.
He stretched and yawned, still watching the two men approach through the mud. As he’d surmised, they were Scandi - big men with broad shoulders and well-muscled arms, with light-coloured hair and ruddy faces. The government had brought the Scandies to New Zealand for their skill with the squaring axe, and their usefulness in clearing away the forests. He could picture these two, clearing land side-by-side, never stopping to ask themselves if they were satisfied with their lives.
They stared at him anxiously. Come to ask him a favour, by the look of them, and expected him to turn them down. He took off his blue forage cap, left over from his days in the 57th Regiment, and inspected the inside, not looking at them. Whatever it was they were after, he wasn’t interested. No favours. No bribes. He had a good contract with the Royal Mail. He was damned if he was going to jeopardize that, as much as the job sapped his will to live. He’d been trying to set up a private investigation agency, but that was going nowhere. No one needed anything investigated. Not in this town.
“Excuse me,” said one, a desperate-looking fellow with yellow, tousled hair. “If you are Sergeant Hardy, could you help us, please? I am Hans Christian Nissen and this is my friend Pieter Sorensen.”
Frank looked up at him, shading his eyes against the glare. “Help? What kind?” He couldn’t imagine them needing help with anything. They could break him in half without a thought.
“I must find my brother Paul and my cousin Jens.”
Frank stifled a yawn. Runaway boys. Great. “Run off, have they?”
“I do not think so,” said Nissen carefully. “They wouldn’t do that. Maybe they drowned, or are lost somewhere.”
“So just disappeared then?”
“I last saw my brother Paul a fortnight ago,” said Nissen. “When my son Claus was born. Paul came to fetch me at the sawmill. But I didn’t think about him again until Mette asked me…she was taking care of my wife and the baby…my brother told me he was going across the river to see someone. I was busy and I didn’t pay attention. Paul should have come to see the baby, but he didn’t and I…I was thinking only of Johanna and the baby, and Anna, my little girl.”
“Have you been to the police?”
“We talked to Constable Price, and he asked everyone if they had seen the boys. And many people searched the riverbanks, but they found nothing, no trace of them,” said Sorensen. “And Constable Price says now he can do nothing more. He says to ask you…we need to know what happened to them. Someone maybe has…” He stopped and looked sideways at his friend, as if afraid to voice his thoughts.
“We think maybe bushwhackers killed them and left them somewhere in the bush,” said Hans Christian. His chin started to quiver and he stared at his feet, his fists clenched by his sides. “Constable Price says you would know…we must find the boys, even if they are dead by the bushwhackers.”
Frank looked at his feet to hide a smile. Not much chance of bushwhackers. These people were obviously not worth robbing. “Maybe, if they were carrying a lot of money, or…”
Nissen looked at Frank and shook his head. “No money, no. They worked sometimes at the logging camp as spotters but didn’t make much money. They came from Schleswig a year ago and I was helping them until… they were just boys, seventeen and eighteen.” He stopped and looked away, blinking.
Frank shrugged. “Well then, I wouldn’t worry too much about bushwhackers. They don’t kill people for no reason—only if there’s money involved or goods.”
Nissen’s shoulders relaxed. He wasn’t much older than his brother and cousin, Frank realized. Twenty-one, twenty-two, perhaps.
“Maybe they drowned,” Nissen said after a minute. “Constable Price thinks so. But Paul, he was – is a big man and a good swimmer, I think. And Knud,” he paused for a minute, struggling for an explanation. “Knud is Jens’ cousin on his father’s side. Knud is the one the boys visited that day. Knud says they told him they crossed the river on a log and would go back the same way.”
“So, one fell off the log, the other went in to save him,” said Frank.
“Perhaps that is so, but there was no log.”
“What do you mean, no log?” said Frank, irritated now. “I thought you said they crossed the river on a log?”
“Yah, yah,” Hans Christian agreed. “But when we went to look later there was no log, and no marks of a log either. And the river is wide there.”
“Could they have used a log to float across?” said Frank. He was losing interest and distracted by a troop of Armed Constables who’d entered the Square from the Foxton road, looking dangerous but interesting.
Nissen shook his head. “The logs here don’t float,” he said. “I know about logs in New Zealand. I’m a mill hand at a sawmill—for now—and I work with logs every day, the rimu and the totara. Mostly they sink after a few minutes unless they are very, very dry.”
“Hmm,” said Frank. The Armed Constables had dismounted and were watering their horses at the trough in front of Snelson’s general store. “Well, drowning is still the most likely possibility. Sooner or later they’ll surface.”
“We don’t want to guess,” interrupted Sorensen angrily, pulling Frank’s attention away from the troopers. “We want to know. Constable Price said you drive your coach up to Napier. You could ask there. Or you could look in the Gorge, make sure they aren’t trapped somewhere. You could help us find them. We have so little time. We work always.”
Nissen took a small purse out of his pocket and offered it to Frank. “I can pay you to find my cousin and my brother.”
The money in that purse had been put aside to pay for the land they were clearing. Frank felt sorry for the man, but he was looking for work that would challenge him. Searching up and down riverbanks and asking questions up in Napier would lead nowhere. More than likely the young men had drowned and his family would have to wait until they floated up.
He made a decision. “I’m sorry. I’d like to help you, but I can’t. I can ask up in Napier for you, but that’s about it.”
Nissen held out his purse to Frank again, but Frank waved it away. “Don’t worry about paying me. Asking in Napier is nothing. Help me fill in my time there. But that’s all I can do.” He put his hat back on, low at the front, then pulled it into place from the back with a quick tug.
They plodded off across the Square, shoulders down, not speaking to each other.
Hop Li, the Hotel Royal cook, came out onto the verandah from the kitchen.
“What did they want, those Yaya?”
“They wanted me to find two lads who’ve gone missing,” said Frank.
“Two Yaya boys?” asked Hop Li. “I know about that. Read about it in the paper. Drowned in the river, for sure.”
Frank agreed. “Probably. I said I’d ask up in Napier. One of the boys was interested in a girl up there. But that’s all.”
“Your time, boss,” said Hop Li. “Do what you want. But you won’t find them in Napier or anywhere else. They drowned, for sure.”
He paused. The Armed Constabulary were on the move again, trotting towards the hotel. They wore the bush uniform, with shawls strapped around their waists like kilts, heavy, laced-up Blucher boots, carbines at the ready across their saddles. Still the old short-barrelled Calisher and Terry carbine, like Frank’s own weapon. Each of them gave Frank a hard look. He met their eyes steadily, one at a time. Always on the lookout for deserters, the bastards, and recognizing him as an ex-soldier. Did they never give up?
“That reminds me,” said Hop Li. “The soldiers there with the shawl party. I have a card game for you tonight with two of them. You want to make some easy money?”
Frank scratched his chin. “If you like. Nothing else to do.”
He’d been in the Armed Constabulary himself for a couple of years after he left the Imperial Army. Back then he’d been wild to kill Hauhau, as many of them as he could, to revenge himself for what they’d done to his brother Will. He’d served under the little colonel, Colonel Whitmore, chasing Titokowaru around between Patea and Wanganui, then into the great Te Ngaere swamp in central Taranaki. He still woke up in a cold sweat thinking about what he’d seen.
The soldiers were a pair of hard-eyed Irishmen who nevertheless lacked the card-playing skills of Frank and Hop Li. They telegraphed their good hands with broad smiles and chuckles and Frank soon had a small pile of coins sitting in front of him. As usual, Hop Li played the greenhorn, acting like he had never seen a deck of cards before, passing information to Frank with disingenuous comments about his garden or his cooking. This was not the first time they had played this game before, taking money from men who deserved to lose it.
Frank could see the men were annoyed with their bad luck and started a conversation to distract them.
“I saw your troop earlier today,” he said. “Don’t often see a full company in town. Something going on?”
“Not supposed to say,” said one, a short, chunky man named Wilson, slapping a card on the table.
“A secret operation?” asked Frank.
Wilson looked at his hand, sighed and played a card.
“Looking for someone,” he said. He stared at Frank, waiting to see what he was going to play. “Can’t tell you who. Can’t scare people.”
“A deserter?” asked Frank. He flipped his trump card on the table. “Isn’t it time you left the poor bastards alone?”
“Whitmore says they’ll be deserters until they’re dead,” said Wilson as Frank scooped up the cards. “He’d give a bucket of cash for Kimble Bent.” He tossed a shilling at Frank. “Hell’s teeth. You’re killing me. An unforgiving man is Whitmore. But it isn’t a deserter we’re looking for, exactly. Another bastard. A bad one. Can’t say more though.”
“I served under Whitmore,” said Frank. “Back in the ’69 campaign against Titokowaru, with your lot. Many from my regiment did. Hard man then. I doubt he’s changed.”
“Get to keep any of the heads?” asked the other Irishman, Benson. “I heard he gave bounties for heads. Ten quid for chief’s heads, five for the rest.”
“Never touched a head myself,” said Frank, staring at his cards. His hand had started to shake and he slammed a down card to make it stop. The images came at him like this, unbidden, unexpected. “Too barbaric for me.” He paused for a minute, collecting himself. “But Whitmore asked for ears, not heads. Some men got carried away, I know. Lot of blood lust in that war, on both sides.”
He took a deep breath and looked up at the two Irishmen. The heads. It had been a long time ago, the memories buried deep, and he pushed them back to the depths from where they had arisen. “I did hear of one colour ensign who took a head of a corpse, gouged out one of the eyes and took back to Whitmore, pretending it was Titokowaru,” he said, repeating a story many had told back then. “Tito had only one eye,” he added, for Hop Li’s benefit.
“He get extra money for that?” asked Hop Li, interested.
Frank paused, mostly for effect. “He would have, only he removed the wrong eye.”
The two Irishmen laughed loudly and Frank felt the tension ease from his shoulders.
They played on, the Irishmen in a happier mood but still losing.
Eventually, they ran out of money and left to return to the Oxford Hotel, where the Armed Constabulary were temporarily billeted. Hop Li had fed them and served them his watered-down whisky all night, so they were poorer but happier and not as drunk as they might have been.
Hop Li fussed around, cleaning off the chairs they had sat in with carbolic soap and a hard rubbing. “What do they wear under those shawls?” he asked Frank. “Sitting on my chairs with bare bums I bet. Next time I’ll make them wear trousers or no game.”
He counted out the winnings. “Fifteen bob for you,” he said, handing a pile of coins to Frank. A quid for me.” He always took extra to cover his expenses.
You have a good eye for a dupe,” Frank said, scooping up his winnings. “Almost too easy, those two.”
“Could be setting us up for next time,” said Hop Li. “Better be careful.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” said Frank.
“You’re not deserter, are you, boss?” asked Hop Li.
“No,” said Frank. “Not me. My brother was though. Went across the Tangahoe River and vanished. Didn’t know what happened to him for a long time.”
“Like those Yaya,” said Hop Li. “Went across the river, and they’re gone without a trace like they said in the paper. Same story.” He scooped up the cards and put them in a drawer. “What happened?”
Frank had not told the story to anyone, but he sensed Hop Li would not condemn his brother for what he’d done. It would feel good to talk about it to someone. It was in his mind now, with the discussion on bounty heads.
“My younger brother, Will, was also a Die Hard,” he said. “He wasn’t a strong man; couldn’t even stand the sight of a horse with a broken leg being put down. Read a lot though. He imagined himself with a bayonet and a sword charging down a valley towards Russian guns. A glorious death. The poets have a lot to answer for.”
“He wanted to die in glory,” said Hop Li. “Seems silly to me. Better to live scared and careful, right boss? Watch out for yourself? That’s the best.”
“Exactly,” said Frank. “My father couldn’t talk him out of it. Told him our mother would have hated it. Didn’t stop him though. He got into trouble up near Patea. He had a run-in with a corporal and would’ve been sent to the brig for a long stretch. A flogging as well.” He paused for a minute, thinking about it, then continued. “He took the coward’s way out. Deserted to the enemy. The Hauhau rebels.”
Hop Li shook his head and sighed. Frank watched him bustle about, preparing for breakfast the next day, running the shillings through his fingers and thinking about what had happened to his brother, the memory now forced to the surface.
They were encamped beside the Tangahoe River in South Taranaki waiting for the battle to begin after a long, forced march from New Plymouth. The cold turned exposed skin blue, and the rain left their woollen uniforms permanently damp and smelly. And always it rained, unrelentingly.
Will suffered more than most of the men, who complained loudly but did their best to keep each other’s spirits up. He scowled and complained, and refused to have much to do with the other men. One night, with everyone huddled around the fire trying to keep warm, Will’s corporal had ordered him to go out into the bush and cut more wood.
“It’s your turn,” he’d said.
“You can’t send a man out to chop wood in weather like this,” Will had said. “I won’t do it, and that’s all there is to say. I won’t be treated like a dog that must always obey its master.”
The corporal had looked at him coldly, knowing he was the brother of a non-commissioned officer.
“Refusing an order, hey? You get on out there now or there’ll be hell to pay. And don’t think your brother will save you.”
“I won’t do it,” said Will. “And you can do what you like about it. It don’t matter to me at all, what happens to me. I’m done with it.”
The corporal refrained from doing anything to Will immediately but reported him the next day to the officer in command. Will was arrested, confined to the prison tent and sentenced to twenty-five lashes on the triangle. After the lashing, he was to spend a year in gaol in Wanganui Town in the Rutland Stockade on half rations, with the worst kind of men to be found in her Majesty’s Imperial Forces. Frank went to visit him in the prison tent to implore him to recant.
“Listen, Will,” he said. “I can get them to reduce the number of lashes, maybe even get you sent home in disgrace. But you must apologize to the corporal and beg Colonel Hassard’s forgiveness. On your knees! On your belly if necessary.”
Will had shrugged. “I’d die as soon as apologise to that miserable bastard. I’ll take what’s coming to me. Glad to be away from this hellish place.”
That night, under cover of darkness, Will had escaped from the camp and crossed the river to join the Hauhau. Frank was fortunate he’d spent the night drinking and playing cards with Captain Porter and two other men, or suspicion would have fallen on him. But he dreaded what might happen to Will with the Hauhau.
Nothing was heard of Will for several weeks. A scout came back saying he’d seen a young European sitting at a campfire with Hauhau warriors, but they couldn’t tell from the description if it was Will or one of several other deserters who’d crossed over in the weeks following Will’s desertion. Waiting and wondering had been hell.
“I changed my mind,” he said to Hop Li, letting the coins drop to the table one last time. “My brother disappeared without a trace for weeks, and I could hardly bear it. I should help Nissen. Maybe the outcome will be better for him than it was for me.”
“That’s what I think,” said Hop Li. “You like to do good things for people. I know you. You’ll feel better about your brother if you help the Yaya.”
Hans Christian Nissen was extremely happy Sergeant Hardy was now willing to help him. Frank rode out to his cottage in the small Scandi community on the edge of Palmerston to tell Nissen he’d changed his mind. The community lay in an area of cleared totara and rimu trees, surrounded on three sides by dense forest, with solid-looking little cottages set along the side of a rutted dirt track, looking almost like a German village, although much wilder. The Scandies had burned down the trees first, then cleared most of the stumps away. The cottages sat behind neat vegetable gardens. Hens and goats, penned in by the surrounding bush, roamed freely.
He found Nissen and Sorensen sitting in front of one of the cottages smoking pipes together. They rose to greet him, their faces bright with hope.
“I’ll search when I can,” he told them. “And I won’t take any money for it. I’ll report to you from time to time, let you know where I’ve searched, in case you have time to search yourselves.”
As he spoke to Nissen he could see a pair of young women talking in front of the next cottage. They had their backs to him, and one was carrying a small boy on her hip. Every now and then, the other would clutch at her sister’s shoulder, laughing. At one point, she half-turned and he saw her face in profile, a strong mobile face with lightly sunburned skin and expressive features. She was tall and slender, with golden hair that caught the sunlight; he couldn’t take his eyes off her. It was as if the clouds had parted, the sun had started to shine again and spring had arrived.
Nissen saw him staring and said, “They are sisters. Maren and Mette. Pretty girls, yes?” He gave Frank a hard look, which Frank interpreted as meaning keep your hands off them. He looked away from the girl regretfully. He couldn’t mess with the women in a community like this. The men would tear him apart if he smiled at any of them.
“I was noticing their cheerfulness,” he said. “You have a small paradise here, I think.”
Nissen’s habitually gloomy face lit up. “We’re happy here,” he said. “In Schleswig, it was not so good for us, with the Prussians…and the war.”
“War is never good,” said Frank. He almost meant it.
He rode back towards town, his mind on the young woman, wondering whether he would see her again. He distracted himself by thinking about the matter at hand, the disappearance of the boys who had crossed the river. Then, as so often happened, the story of his brother returned.
Will had been gone for weeks, with no news. They didn’t know if he’d deserted successfully, been drowned in the Tangahoe River, or even killed himself somewhere.
Then, one morning, a Hauhau warrior had ridden up on the other side of the river. He was a huge man with a full black beard, bare-chested but with a flax cloak over his shoulders, wearing European trousers, but shoeless, with toes tucked around the stirrups in the Māori style. Over his shoulder, he was carrying something that looked like a sack - a dark rope with a round object swinging below it. He dismounted from his horse, plunged a forked stick into the soft sand, and hung the object from it. Looking towards the soldiers across the river from him, he made a sign with his hand across his throat, pointed at them, and rode away grinning.
Silence for a few minutes, then someone said in a choked voice, “By Christ, it’s young Hardy. The fiends.”
The head had hung there for days. He was drawn to it with a horrible fascination. What had it felt like for Will? Had they killed him first, or was he still alive when they had started hacking at his head, knowing what was about to happen.
Eventually, he went out early one morning with his Snider-Enfield and a box of cartridges and sat on the banks of the river tearing open the packets with his teeth, pouring in the powder, wrapping the paper around the shot and ramming it into the muzzle, shooting towards the terrible disembodied head, without thinking about what he was doing. He was a dead shot. He’d been trained to hit a four-foot by two-foot target at 600 yards. But that day his hand shook so much he’d used a full box of cartridges before the shot blasted away his brother’s head in a red cloud. Afterwards, he’d sat with his head in his hands, his mind in turmoil, his guts roiling.
Colonel Hassard said nothing. Frank’s men looked at him sideways, as if he’d murdered his own brother. But he knew if he had to look at that head for much longer he would have turned the rifle on himself. He almost did anyway, sitting on the bank of the river with his Enfield at the ready, staring across at the smoke from their fires, fingering the trigger, his mind unable to cope with the horror.
Later they heard stories about cannibalism among the Taranaki Hauhau; how they cut out the heart of the first enemy killed in battle, and burned and ate it; or how they decapitated enemies and smoked the heads to preserve them. The Hauhau leaders began carrying around the severed heads in sacks, as recruitment tools, using them to convince Kupapa Māori, those who decided that showing loyalty to the Crown was the best way to keep their lands, of the rightness of the Hauhau cause. Frank was glad, then, that he’d obliterated his brother’s head. At least it would not be carried around like an obscenity for the bastards to look at and joke about, or to pull in recruits for their evil cause.
For the next few weeks, Frank had slept with difficulty, waking every night from nightmares, sweating in his cold tent. The nightmares were always the same; Will screaming as the madmen hacked at his neck with tomahawks. In his dream, he never saw his brother die. But he awoke with the image of his brother’s head on the pole seared on his vision. He was ready to kill the man who had killed his brother or to kill any man who would do what that man had done.
Eventually, the Land Wars were over. The 57th Regiment returned to England with the rest of the Imperial Army and he stayed behind, joining the Armed Constabulary to fight in the Taranaki Wars. It was all he knew how to do.