The Colour

Harriet took with her as many possessions as she could carry, including the bulky canvas tent and her scarlet blanket and a dented pannikin. As Joseph helped her strap these things to her back, she found herself wishing that she had her horse with her, to let him shoulder the burden. Billy would have picked his dainty way round the wash-dirt and the shafts and the stones of the river. But Billy was far away, munching clover on the Orchard Run.

Harriet left the camp after midnight. She sensed that some of the Kokatahi diggers were still awake and heard her leave. One face peered out at her as she whispered goodbye to Joseph, touching his cheek with her hand, so she let this inquisitive man hear her say: ‘I’m sorry, Joseph. I’m sorry. You were right when you told me that this is not a woman’s world.’ And she knew that the man was still watching as she walked away, but she was walking away towards Kaniere, towards Hokitika and the sea. When she crossed the river and came back along the other side, she would take care to follow a path out of sight of the Kokatahi goldfield.

Harriet carried a staff in one hand, a limb of black beech, cut by Joseph, so that she wouldn’t stumble or slip when she crossed the water, and in the other hand, she held on to Lady’s leash. The dog seemed enthralled by the moonlight and the shadows, distracted by scents, biting the air, as though she, too, knew that she was leaving Kokatahi far behind and making her way into a green and soundless place, where there would be fish to lap at the river’s edge and kingfishers to startle from the trees.

Though Harriet knew that what she was doing was daring, even dangerous, she had no other feeling, as she walked, than one of elation and she thought that to be moving forward, to be travelling in expectation, was the thing which – after twelve years of being a governess, yoked to a room, frozen behind a wooden desk as time kept passing and never stopping for her – she enjoyed beyond all other.

She felt buoyant and steady through the long trek towards the mountains on the north bank of the river. She didn’t know what time it was when she crossed the water for the second time and came at last to the shingle where she’d found the grains of gold. She felt only that the night had begun its slow descent towards morning, and that she was tired now and her skirts were wet and her feet were aching with cold and she longed to wrap herself in her scarlet blanket and sleep.

But she walked on. She’d promised herself that she’d set up her tent out of sight of Chen’s garden. The shingle bank ended at a turn in the river, but beyond this another small beach appeared, with low vegetation at its back, and though the moon was almost gone, Harriet could see, by the milky light on the water, that the ground was level here.

Harriet took some charred, fibrous kūmara from her knap-sack and she and Lady ate it, and then Harriet spread the canvas tent flat on the ground and they lay on this and Harriet held the dog to her as she might have held a child, with its warm back against her chest, and they slept until the light came.

Though the river flowed only yards from the place where her tent was pitched, the spot was dry and the ground yielded to the tent pegs. Harriet collected brushwood and dry branches and set a new fire in a circle of stones. In the earth covered by the tent she dug a deep hole and filled this, too, with stones. This would be the place where she would keep her gold.

Fantails and silver-eyes arrived at sunrise and caught insects hovering in the white mist that spread itself over the water. The bush creaked and clattered as the light grew bright.

Harriet took out the gun Joseph had given her at D’Erlanger’s Hotel and examined its workings and loaded it with two bullets and laid it by the place where she would sleep, with its barrel pointing away from her into the scrub. Then, she made coffee and fried bacon on the fire and wondered whether the gardener, Chen, would see smoke rising and cross the river to investigate, or whether, before the next night came, she would pay a visit to him. She thought that she would give him money for a head of cabbage and onions to fry with the bacon and carrots and leeks to make a vegetable broth that would keep her fed for a long while.

And this ‘long while’ displayed itself before her, a slow feast of solitary days, each one like the one before, except that the dark would arrive a little earlier, except that the niche she’d crammed with stones would quietly fill with gold.

She knew that every miner on this river was in a race with the coming winter, that her survival here depended upon the temperature of the air, but she felt, on this first morning, that time and she were walking in step, that she had a little space – to rinse gold out of the river, to travel to the waterfall in search of Pare, to stare at the stars – and that when the snows came in, to drive her away and obliterate her camp, she, who had dreamed for so long about the mountains, would have travelled far without moving: she would have framed a question about her life and all that remained then would be to try to answer it.

Harriet panned for gold all through the warm afternoon on the shingle opposite Chen’s garden. There was no wind or bite in the air and Harriet felt hot and excited and alive. She collected a fistful of golden grains in a tin cup, and washed and rinsed them until they shone. And the ease with which she had gathered them, so that the little beach was barely disturbed, struck her as miraculous. She also felt the unfairness of it. Only two hours away were the deep shafts and excavations and all the squalor and disappointed hopes of Kokatahi. Here, a child could have sat down on the mud and picked up the little bright nuggets, like shells from a Norfolk strand.

There was no sign of Chen until the sun started its decline and then Lady began barking and Harriet looked up and saw the Chinese man standing on the edge of his garden, watching her. She hadn’t seen him arrive; he must have crossed the river lower down. Now, perhaps he had been going to check his fishing net and then he had caught sight of her – a stranger in his isolated world – and he stood there without moving. He wore his fur hat, but his clothes looked as though they were made of thin material, like cotton. He was holding the scarlet-handled hoe. It seemed to Harriet that he wasn’t looking directly at her, but at the ground on which she was standing.

Harriet stood up. She let the tin cup lie where it was on the shingle. She wiped her hands on her pinafore. Then she called out: ‘I have money to buy vegetables.’

She waited. Chen stood perfectly still. And she thought now that perhaps he was a man who never spoke, never entered into any transaction with the people of this country, except to sell them his produce in some way that required no words?

And what came into her mind, as the silence between herself and Chen accumulated and spread itself out along the water, was all the loud and monotonous babble Joseph had spent his life intoning at the livestock auctions. And she found herself wondering: did he dream about this old, chivvying language? Did he long for a life that would be more transparent in its gestures and have less need for words?

He put down the hoe and walked to where the rope lay under the water and Harriet wondered whether he’d strung ropes across the river in several places, so that he could wade across the water wherever it was quietest.

He held the rope taut for her, as she crossed the river, holding on to her boots. Lady bounded and splashed at her side. When she arrived on the further bank, Chen held out his hand for her to take, but she didn’t take it because her balance was good and she wanted to show him that she was strong and independent and free.

Harriet wanted to begin by telling Chen that she’d been here before, stolen carrots, slept in the scant shade of the plum tree, but she had no idea how much of this he would understand, so she set down her boots, put a hand on her collar bone and said: ‘My name is Harriet.’

Lady was crouching in the wet grass, looking at Chen as if he were a stray sheep she would soon set about returning to the flock. When he looked down at the dog, Harriet saw his eyes flicker with amusement.

Pao Yi looked up at the sky, as if he saw in it some shimmering resemblance to the distant lake, or as if he could fly back to it like a bird. Then, he turned and walked towards the vegetable garden and Harriet bent down and put on her boots.

She put all of this to one side and told Pao Yi that she was going in search of a Maori woman called Pare. She asked him whether he had been to the waterfall. He told her that he had been once. In his own language he would have explained to her that the waterfall made him uneasy, that it reminded him of the weir over which his parents had tumbled to their deaths, but he lacked the English words to say this and Harriet saw him try to tell her something else about the waterfall and then stop and look away.

They fell silent. Harriet could hear pigeons clattering in the high bush behind them. Then she asked to be shown the vegetable plot and they walked in single file along the neat paths and Pao Yi recited in English and in Cantonese the names of the things he had grown. After a while, Harriet asked: ‘Did you have a garden at Heron Lake?’

They gathered an armful of vegetables and Pao Yi put them in a sack. Harriet held out her money and Pao Yi took a few pence and then he bowed and turned and hurried away, as though this taking of money from her vexed him. She watched him take off his fur hat and go into his hut with its doorway made of sacking on a wooden frame and close the door behind him. Lady made as if to follow Pao Yi, but Harriet called her back.

Yet she waited. She thought that perhaps Pao Yi had gone to fetch something to show her and would quickly reappear. She tried to envisage what he might keep in his hut and whether he slept on a mattress or only on the hard earth or even in a hammock because he was a fisherman and could tie a net.

But he didn’t reappear and, after five or six minutes had passed, Harriet felt stupid waiting there. She picked up the vegetable sack and walked back towards the river. She began thinking of the fine broth she was going to make and the long letter she was going to write to her father.

With his pick and with his hands, Pao Yi unblocked the entrance to his cave, stone by stone. He went into the cave and took with him a small oil lamp that burned with a steady blue-and-yellow flame. The lamp gave out a little heat, as well as light.

Pao Yi lay down, resting on one elbow and lit an opium pipe. He saw the walls of the cave begin to swell and gleam. He was filled with an apprehension of the beautiful strangeness of the world.

He began to dream of an avenue of lime trees. The scent of the trees and the vision of his own feet walking under them created in him a sense of the harmoniousness of all things.

Far away, a man hurled a fishing net into the air from a scarlet boat on Heron Lake, but the man was not he. Crabs came creeping into the net, an accumulation of whiskers and claws and eyes like seed pearls, but they were not his to sell when the man rowed to shore, for he was not the fisherman, he was not there; he was treading the long, soft road under the limes.

On he walked. And soon he saw that a woman, stately as the trees, was moving in step with him on slender, dusty feet and the lime seeds lay all about them like green grasshoppers, and in his own language he began to describe to her how, when a plague of grasshoppers had come to Heron Lake and devoured the string beans and choked the water-wheels, he had shown his ingenuity, his ability to adapt and survive, by netting the grasshoppers and roasting them in oil with salt and sesame seeds and they were as succulent as crisp, fried sea-grass, a veritable delicacy, and soon everybody was gathering them and eating them and praising him, Pao Yi, Brother of Righteousness, for inventing such a delicious recipe.

The woman smiled as she walked, smiled at his story of the roasted grasshoppers, and Pao Yi felt the attraction of this smile, which he knew to be flawed by some small detail that he couldn’t identify, but which seemed to lead him, by slow degrees, to a feeling of desire.

The avenue of lime trees stretched out ahead of the two walkers in a swaying and shifting and endless green and Pao Yi knew that this garden, where the avenue had been planted, had been created on such a varied and colossal scale that he would be able to wander in it for a long, long time and never take exactly the same path nor tread twice in his own footsteps and always, as he went along, he would be aware of the woman engaged on her own journey – separate from his and yet by some coincidence in step with his – and find himself looking forward to every patch of dappled sunlight between the trees which revealed her face to him and searching his muddled head for some other story to tell her, like the story of the grasshoppers fried with sesame seeds, that would make her smile.

He still walked in the avenue of his imaginings and he thought that when the trees finally ended, there he would discover a pond where pink carp swam in circles under the broad lily-leaves and where he would watch the woman lean over to wash her feet among the fishes.

Every morning, Joseph began work once more on the eighth shaft and its accompanying drainage bore. Bucketful after bucketful after bucketful of earth was hauled to the surface by the makeshift windlass, but Joseph didn’t bother to wash any pay-dirt above the line of the blue clay, nor did he barrow it down to the water; he just tipped it out at the shaft-head, where it piled up and hardened in the late sun and the dry wind.

Though the windlass kept turning, though the heavy buckets were lifted and emptied, Joseph accomplished these tasks without giving them any thought and he knew that his life here at Kokatahi had become a sleep-walking life.

Alone in his tent, persecuted by nightmares, he examined the golden grains that Harriet had brought him, but he found he now had difficulty believing that what he held in his palm really was gold. Sometimes, he scratched at the grains with his nail, half expecting the sheen to peel away, to reveal the dull base metal beneath. He thought that this find of Harriet’s had an illusory quality to it; it had been too easy, its timing too particular. He began to suspect her of some deception, knew her to be capable of outwitting him with ease, and he cursed his parents – his father in particular – for bequeathing to him a slow and unremarkable mind. If only he had been cleverer, he reasoned, then life would not have tortured him as it had.

He was able to tell himself to be patient, to trust his wife, to wait out the month that they had agreed upon and never be tempted to walk up-river to where she was camped and risk being followed by other men from Kokatahi. He thought her plan ingenious. She had understood what was needed; she had seen that their only hope lay in being ahead of the crowd.

That Harriet was panning for gold without a licence was a question which now and then worried Joseph, but he saw that there was no way to purchase a miner’s right and still keep her whereabouts a secret. He tried, therefore, to ‘adjust’ the matter in his mind, told himself that she was only ‘fossicking’, that she had no real equipment, that once the gold was safe, then he would deal with the Government Licensing Office, bribe somebody if need be, or plead ignorance: ‘My wife went in search of a friend of the Orchard family, sir. She came upon her bank of gold by miraculous chance when washing her feet in the river . . .’

And then at the fly-blown hotel in Hokitika, he would gather the colour into his arms and know at last that he was free. Free in the way that Hamish McConnell was free, to embark on a new phase of his life, to begin everything again. For Joseph Blackstone knew now what he wanted to do: he wanted to make amends to Rebecca’s family for his crime.

In his nightmares at Kokatahi, he returned to Parton in the time before the crime, to the days in which he was planning it with his friend, Merrick Dillane, the veterinary surgeon, a man who had soft, red hands and a tender voice and a cold, calculating mind. He saw again the ease with which he and Dillane had done what they’d done and walked away and thought themselves clever and free for a little while. He remembered that the whole process from beginning to end had rested upon Dillane’s desire to be rid of a bad-tempered Shire horse . . .

Merrick Dillane bred Shires in his spare time. He loved the greys especially. He liked to stroke the white tresses of their feet. But he had one mare, named Dido, who bit him whenever he tried to do this and kicked at her fencing and bucked like a steer in the daisy field and generally vexed Dillane with all her ungovernable behaviour.

He came to Joseph, his friend the livestock auctioneer, to say he wanted to sell Dido. The day that he came was the day that Joseph had been told by Rebecca that she was carrying his child.

The plan was swift to arrive in Joseph’s mind and swift to accomplish. Joseph promised to guarantee Merrick Dillane a ‘pretty price’ for Dido at the auctions if he would only help him with his present problem. He called it ‘getting help’ and never referred to it in any other way. And Dillane picked up this term for it and carried it forward through the coming days. He would help his friend. Together, they would help Rebecca. What were friends for, if they could not help each other?

Dillane promised Joseph that Rebecca would have no memory of what they were planning to do to her. He said there would be no trace of it in her consciousness, neither at the time nor in memory in the time to come, that it would vanish as though it had never been. ‘All she will remember’, he said, ‘will be the foal . . .’

They took her to see a new-born Shire foal in Dillane’s stables. The soft-hearted Rebecca had a weakness for small creatures. She leaned into the stall, all entranced by the foal – as Joseph and Dillane had known she would be – and cooed to it, as to a baby of her own. She reached out her hand to stroke its nose. And at that moment, she was felled to sudden sleep by the passing under her nostrils of rag soaked in ether of chloride, cut with a pearly opiate, a ‘useful vapour’ devised by Dillane himself and known to grateful farmers and pet owners as ‘Dillane’s Dream’.

They carried her into Dillane’s house and laid her on the operating table, where sheep and cats and bulldog terriers had so often lain, and Dillane put on his surgical apron and his gloves. He told Joseph that he could stay ‘to see it done’ if he wanted to, but Joseph began to feel faint, as though he had inhaled some of the vapour, and he understood that he wanted not to know how it was going to be done, so that he would never have to imagine it, could choose to think, if he wanted, that it had never really happened and that the events which it would bring in its wake occurred of their own accord and through no fault or design of Joseph Blackstone.

So Joseph went out of the room. It took very little time. Merrick Dillane’s red hands, holding the surgical instrument, parted Rebecca’s thighs, reached in and accomplished with two stabs all there was to do. He made sure the wall of the womb was ruptured. Then he came out and told Joseph that ‘our part in this is almost over’.

The two men carried Rebecca back to the stables, and laid her down on the floor by the foal’s stall, exactly where she had lately been. They let her sleep for a while and then patted her cheek to wake her, and when she opened her eyes they told her she had fainted. They gave her smelling salts and Dillane went off to fetch a cup of water and Joseph stroked her curly hair and she clung to him and said: ‘Lord, Joseph Blackstone, that child of yours has begun to lead me a pretty dance already.’

She drank the water that Dillane brought. She stood and smoothed down her rumpled skirt and tried to smile. Then Joseph lifted her into his pony-cart and drove her home.

Perhaps the instrument with which Dillane had ruptured the wall of her womb had been insufficiently cleaned after one of his operations on an animal? Nobody would ever know. All they knew was that Rebecca Millward died of a violent, puerperal fever no doctor could alleviate.

Joseph Blackstone stood in the road and saw her coffin carried to the church in Parton and knew that there was no difference between him and a man who has committed murder.

The auction of the Shire horse never went as planned. Joseph had meant to bribe someone to stand in the crowd to talk up Dido’s price. His father had sometimes used this method to sell animals and usually with good success and tankards of ale at the Plough and the Stars to celebrate afterwards. But so haunted was Joseph by the sight of Rebecca’s coffin that this necessary part of the plan went clean out of his mind. And when the day of the auction came, the assembled bidders already seemed to know that Dido was a bad-tempered horse. Nobody wanted her. Joseph’s gavel had to come down on a paltry sum.

And then he saw Merrick Dillane striding towards him. Dillane led him away beyond the crowd at the market. He jabbed a finger at his dusty black lapel. He told him he had performed his part of the bargain; now he wanted ‘a correct sum’ for his horse.

So then Joseph knew that he had no idea how to escape from the darkness closing round him, unless it might be to engineer his own death, to pass the way she’d passed, in her oak box, towards Parton Magna’s Church of the Redeemer, where among the ancient graves the primroses were shining.

He was helpless. He paid Dillane, but he knew it would not rest there. Dillane would ask for more. Joseph’s money began to leach away. Even Lilian, from whom he withheld so much, understood that something was wrong. She tried to tempt him back to happiness with his favourite food and with small kindnesses. But nothing could tempt him back. Nothing under the sun until he met Harriet Salt and understood that this tall young woman was in need of a husband.

He burned all the small, illiterate notes Rebecca had written him. He put the curl she had given him into his fly box. He wooed Harriet with dreams of a life far away, of a life begun afresh in the Land of the Long White Cloud . . .

But now the damage was going to cease. In his more lucid and optimistic moments, this was what Joseph tried to reassure himself. It was about to become finite. Harriet had found the colour.

And then Joseph would allow himself to remember that, although the winter was coming in at Kokatahi, the seasons in England would revert to what they had once been and that, perhaps, when he saw Parton again and arrived at the Millwards’ door to unburden himself of his secret, a stray wasp of summer, half intoxicated with death but still alive, might yet be creeping along the garden path.