Isle of Tears

By Deborah Challinor

A vivid and compelling story of enduring love and divided families from one of our bestselling historical novelists.
When armed conflict drives a wedge between Maori and Pakeha, not everyone can choose sides easily. For Isla McKinnon, the choices are bitter. taken in by local Maori when her parents are brutally murdered, she has grown to womanhood and taken a Maori husband. In a thrilling tale of love and loss from the land wars - when simmering tensions between Maori and the encroaching Pakeha settlements exploded into bloody warfare - love and trust are put cruelly to the test. Separated from her husband and her family and restored to Auckland society, Isla must learn to survive in both worlds. Inevitably, she must decide between them, and lose part of her heart forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Mar 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780730400165

Deborah Challinor

Deborah Challinor has a PhD in history and is the author of numerous bestselling novels, including the Children of War series, the Convict Girls series, the Smuggler's Wife series and the Restless Years series. She has also written one young adult novel and two non-fiction books. In 2018, Deborah was made a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature and historical research. She lives in New Zealand with her husband.

Book preview

Part One

THE COMING OF THE STORM

1860–1861

Chapter One

TARANAKI, 4 MARCH 1860

Isla McKinnon was bleeding to death. She had reached up to peg a pair of her father’s breeks onto the frayed washing line when suddenly she’d been doubled over by a sharp, dragging sensation in her belly. Like an urge to move her bowels, but much, much worse.

Screwing up her face against the grinding discomfort, she’d hurried across the sun-baked back yard to the privy at the end of the garden. Inside, leaving the door ajar to let in some light, she’d pulled her drawers aside and sat on the worn wooden seat. Nothing had happened, but when she’d glanced down, her heart had given a single violent thud at the sight of the sinister dark smudges on her inner thighs. Tearing off a strip of newspaper, she’d blotted herself, squeaking with fright when the paper came away stained red with thick, stringy blood.

She sat, now, a hand pressed over her pounding heart. Only fourteen years old and she was dying, bleeding from some terrible internal malady she hadn’t even known she had!

She forced herself to take several deep, calming breaths. Then she stood, dropping the bloody paper into the privy, and stepped out into the bright sunshine. Fighting the urge to race into the house to tell her mam, she made herself walk calmly through the wilted vegetable garden until she reached the back porch, where she paused to remove her boots.

Inside, her mother—a handsome, fair-haired woman whose years of labouring on the family croft had aged her face and hands beyond her thirty-five years—sat at the table peeling potatoes for the midday meal.

‘Have ye hung oot the washing already? That wis quick,’ Agnes McKinnon exclaimed. She regarded her daughter fondly, but when she saw Isla’s pale, shocked face, her heart lurched with fear. ‘What is it? What’s happened?’

Isla sat gingerly on one of the mismatched dining chairs, wondering how to say it so she wouldn’t frighten the life out of her mother. In the end she blurted, ‘I think I’m poorly, Mam,’ and burst into tears.

Agnes dropped her knife into the tattie bowl and hurried around the table, stooping to peer into Isla’s face. ‘Is it a pain ye have? Or are ye sick tae the stomach?’

Isla clamped a hand over her abdomen. ‘A pain. In ma belly. I’m…I’m bleeding, Mam!’

‘Have ye cut yesel’?’ Agnes, alarmed now, tried to pull Isla’s hand away to see.

‘No’ on ma belly, Mam,’ Isla wailed. ‘From it. I’m bleeding…doon there!’

‘Ah.’ Agnes straightened, the furrows across her brow relaxing. ‘Have ye a sore back as well?’

Isla nodded hesitantly, wondering fearfully what that could mean.

‘And sore teats?’

‘Aye.’

‘Then dinnae greet, mo leannan.’ Agnes gently swept a stray lock of Isla’s heavy, pale gold hair back from her face. ‘Ye’ve started your courses, is all.’ She blinked quickly several times and gave a small, sad smile. ‘Ma first bairn, growin’ up already!’

Embarrassed by her naïveté, Isla couldn’t meet her mother’s eye. Her mam had explained to her a year ago what happened when a girl became a woman, but Isla hadn’t much thought about it since. And she certainly hadn’t expected such an alarming demonstration of the fact when her time did come.

Agnes stroked her daughter’s silky hair. ‘Dinnae be upset. Come on, come wi’ me.’

Isla followed her into the small bedroom her parents shared, and waited while her mother rummaged through the top drawer of the rimu chest her husband had made for her. Above it hung a fancy mirror he’d brought back from New Plymouth one day last year: it was the only new, shop-bought piece of furniture Agnes had ever owned, and Isla knew she was very proud of it.

Agnes handed Isla a tidy bundle of towelling rags, and explained: ‘Ye fold one o’ these four or five times and set it between your legs.’ She then gave Isla a cloth belt and a long strip of cheesecloth. ‘Then ye put on the belt, tie one end o’ the cheesecloth tae the back o’ it, pass it between your legs and tie it tae the belt at the front. Like a sling. That keeps the rag in place, ken?’

Isla nodded, even though it sounded rather complicated to her.

‘And ye change the rag for a fresh one when ye’ve the need,’ Agnes finished.

‘But how long does it go on? The bleeding?’

‘Aboot five or six days.’ Agnes slid the drawer shut. ‘And then it’s back a month later and every month for the rest o’ your life, more or less. Unless you’re expecting a bairn, o’ course. Or nursing one.’ She pointed to the belt in Isla’s hands. ‘D’ye want me tae help ye put it on?’

Isla said no and, sensing her embarrassment, Agnes said, ‘I’ll leave ye tae it, then.’

Isla fiddled about for some time before she was satisfied with the arrangement, then self-consciously took a few steps, the wad of towelling between her legs feeling bulky and strange. She peered into the wall mirror at the pale hair, wide cornflower-blue eyes, short straight nose and curved lips that her da said were so pretty, but that she thought were all rather ordinary compared with her mother’s striking features. Furthermore, she noted disappointedly, she didn’t look any more like a woman than she had yesterday.

‘Are ye all right, then?’ Agnes asked when Isla finally reappeared.

‘Aye. I’ll just finish hanging oot the washing, shall I?’

‘Aye, and then can ye call them weans in? Dinner will be ready soon,’ Agnes said. Then she added, ‘You’re a good lassie, Isla, ye really are.’

Isla flushed with pleasure. She was still smiling to herself as she hung the last garment on the line, happy because she was becoming a woman, and happier still that she wasn’t dying of some awful sickness after all. She left the cane washing basket in the sun to air, then set off towards the stream that ran across one corner of her da’s small farm in search of her younger brother and sister.

As she had suspected, they were both there, half-concealed behind a stand of cabbage trees and playing farther away from the house than they were supposed to without supervision. Jamie and Jean were six-year-old twins, both round-faced, copper-haired and blue-eyed, and ‘fair wee trials’, according to their mother. Laddie, the family dog, was with them: Jamie was throwing a stick off the high bank above the stream, and he and Jean were shrieking with laughter as Laddie hurled himself into the air after it, then crashed down into the water with an almighty splash.

Laddie was a black-and-tan short-haired collie, who, according to all the McKinnons, possessed a level of intelligence not normally found in the average dog. Isla’s father, Donal, had purchased him as a pup in Scotland and reared him as a working dog, and the whole family had been heartbroken when they had had to sell him to a neighbouring crofter before they emigrated to New Zealand. So heartbroken, in fact, that early in the morning of the day they left for Campbeltown, Donal McKinnon had crept across the fields to the neighbour’s cottage and taken back the dog, leaving the money the man had paid on his doorstep. Laddie had been very unhappy cooped up in a small pen on the ship’s deck for months, and expensive to feed, but they all agreed it had been worth it.

‘Mam’ll tan your hide if she sees ye doing that,’ Isla said benignly.

‘She’ll no’ see us if ye dinnae tell her,’ Jamie said, accepting the stick from a dripping Laddie, the dog’s furiously wagging tail scattering droplets of water far and wide.

‘Well, you’re tae come in, dinner’s ready soon.’

‘Are Niel and Da back yet?’ Jean asked eagerly. There were streaks of mud on her face and pinafore, her hair had fallen out of its ribbon, and her stockings and boots were soaked. But she was too excited to care: her father usually took his dinner with him when he worked on the farm, so it was always a treat when he came home in the middle of the day.

‘No’ yet.’ Isla moistened a corner of her own pinafore with spit and dabbed at Jean’s face.

Laddie watched with great interest for a moment, then returned to leaping around Jamie, trying to get him to throw the stick again.

‘It’s no’ neeps again, is it?’ he asked warily.

Isla made a face: they all hated turnips, but they grew so easily here. ‘Aye, but there’s tatties as well.’

They met up with their father and brother Niel just as they arrived back at the house. Donal McKinnon was six feet tall, broad of shoulder and back, and as bright-haired as his two youngest children. At the moment, his stubbled face was red from the heat, and from the exertion of clearing scrub all morning.

‘Did ye stack that wood, lad?’ he asked Jamie as they walked to the back porch.

‘Aye, and I chopped some more,’ the little boy boasted, eager as always for praise from his father.

Donal ruffled Jamie’s copper curls. ‘Good lad.’

From the dimness of the interior Agnes called, as she always did, ‘Boots off in the hoose!’ Donal and Niel usually remembered, but the twins were always rushing in and tramping dirt and muck everywhere.

Jean sat down and tugged at one of her boots, grunting with effort.

‘Untie the laces, ye galoot,’ Niel said disparagingly.

‘Niel,’ Donal warned as he prised off his own large boots and set them neatly against the wall, then bent to help Jean with hers.

At thirteen, Niel McKinnon was tall but thin for his age, good-looking with his mother’s fair hair and colouring, and a strongly developed but somewhat naïve view of the world. To Niel something was either right or wrong; there was nothing in between. ‘But Da,’ he said exasperatedly, ‘she kens verra well how tae take her boots off. She only pretends she cannae so ye’ll help her.’ He loved his little sister, but sometimes her babyish behaviour, which he was convinced she exaggerated to her own gain, really irritated him.

‘Wheesht, boy,’ Donal said gently. He knew what Jean was up to, and didn’t mind indulging her at all.

After the family had sat down and Agnes and Isla had served the meal, Jean made a show of sanctimoniously closing her eyes and bowing her head before saying grace.

Give us this day oor daily bread, O Father in heaven, and grant that we who are filled wi’good things from Your open hand, may never close oor hearts tae the hungry, the hopeless, and the poor, in the name o’ the Father, the Son, and o’ the Holy Spirit, Amen.

‘Amen,’ everyone repeated, giggling. Everyone except Jamie, who scowled fiercely.

‘It’s no’ hopeless, it’s homeless!’ he insisted, barely keeping his temper in check. She got it wrong every single time she said grace, and she did it on purpose, he was sure.

‘I said that,’ Jean responded with equal insistence.

‘No, ye said—’

Donal could see a familiar argument developing. ‘That’s enough, lad. She’s only having ye on. Pass the tatties, will ye?’

Jamie passed his father the bowl of potatoes while Jean smirked. He kicked out at her under the table.

‘Ow!’ Isla exclaimed.

‘Did ye get much done this morning?’ Agnes asked.

Donal piled potatoes onto his plate. ‘Aye. I’d say we’re nearly halfway there.’

Agnes was delighted. ‘Well, that’s good news, is it no‘?’

‘Aye, very,’ Donal agreed wryly, regarding the thick calluses on the palms of his hands.

The McKinnons had been crofters on the Isle of Skye, and had only just managed to keep themselves fed and clothed because Donal had worked in Glasgow as a journeyman carpenter for six months of the year while Agnes stayed behind to work the croft. Isla, their eldest surviving child, had been born in 1846, the year the potato crops failed and the great Highland famine had begun. When Isla was almost seven years old, the laird of Donal McKinnon’s croft converted to large-scale sheep farming, and most of his crofters were told to vacate the land they leased from him. So they became the latest victims of the practice of Fuadaich nan Gàidheal, the Clearing of the Gael, that had been eroding the old Highland way of life for decades.

However, the laird was a compassionate man and offered to pay part of the cost of his tenants’ passages to new lives in Australia. So, with the balance of the fare lent by the Highlands and Islands Emigration Society, Donal and Agnes and their three children—Isla, Niel and Anne—left their beloved Scotland just after Christmas of 1853, aboard HMS Hercules. A shipboard outbreak of smallpox and typhus had quarantined the ship in Ireland for three months, and took wee Anne’s life, but late in July they finally reached Adelaide, Australia. Four years later, after hearing a distant cousin speak encouragingly of the wonderful farming opportunities to be had across the Tasman Sea, they set sail for Taranaki on the west coast of the North Island of New Zealand.

When they arrived, it had been with two more children—Jamie and Jean—and little else, but they had at least managed to pay back the Emigration Society loan and put by enough money to get them started in New Zealand. Donal settled his family at New Plymouth and spent the next twelve months carpentering and labouring until he could afford a few head of cattle and a deposit on fifty acres of land some distance south of the Waitara River, which he christened Braeburn and which the agent insisted would be ideal for farming once it was cleared. And Donal had been clearing it, mostly by hand, ever since.

The family had initially lived in a tent, then a hut made of raupo, then Donal had built a two-roomed slab house with a proper wooden floor, shuttered windows and a shingled roof. He’d also taken the precaution of building a cellar beneath the floor, a space big enough to contain the six of them should trouble arise with the local natives, the Maori. The house was smaller than their cottage on Skye had been, but at least here they didn’t have to share it with the cattle.

They were almost entirely self-sufficient, and what they did need to buy was purchased from New Plymouth once a month with money raised by selling a steer or a heifer, money that also paid the interest on Donal’s loan from the New Plymouth Savings Bank. Two steers and two heifers had been necessary to pay for the cart and very expensive pair of bullocks bought recently. They also kept chickens, and a sow and a boar—the offspring of which they either ate or sold—and a house cow named Rosie for milk, cheese and butter.

They were happy at Braeburn, although Donal and Agnes and the older children missed the rugged coastlines, moors and mist-shrouded mountains of Skye, and Agnes sometimes wept at night for the souls of the first, doomed, baby she had borne, buried in Skye soil, and the child she had left behind in an Irish graveyard. She schooled her children herself, teaching them a little arithmetic and how to read and write using catechisms from the family Bible, and made them practise their Scottish Gaelic so they wouldn’t forget who they were—except that Niel now spent more time on the land with his father than bent over his copy book.

And occasionally the McKinnons saw other settler families in the area, although they had no close neighbours. A year ago they had visited a family called McBride who lived several miles away, but because the McKinnons were Church of Scotland and the McBrides were Irish Catholics, the visit, in Agnes’s view, hadn’t been a resounding success and they hadn’t been back. They rarely saw Mr Tulloch, their rather peculiar neighbour on the other side, who was from Suffolk, England, had an ailing wife and no children, and kept himself to himself. It was a very different way of life from the close-knit villages of crofting families on Skye, but here in New Zealand a man was at least his own boss, and if he failed in his endeavours then he had no one else to blame.

‘I’ve good news as well,’ Agnes announced with a small, proud smile.

Donal helped himself to more meat. ‘Oh aye, and what’s that?’

‘Oor Isla has become a woman.’

‘Ah, Mam!’ Isla groaned, blushing wildly.

Donal raised his eyebrows. ‘Hoots! We should be celebratin’, then.’

Jamie and Jean exchanged mystified glances.

‘She disnae look any different tae us,’ Jamie said, perplexed. He turned to Isla. ‘Why are ye a woman?’

She hesitated, then shot a desperate, pleading look at her mother.

‘A body changes as it grows older,’ Agnes replied vaguely, now regretting her announcement. ‘And oor Isla’s has, er…done that.’

‘But how?’ Jean demanded. ‘She’s got a pimple on her chin. Is that what ye mean?’

‘Aye!’ Agnes said with relief.

‘Well, I’m no’ goin’ tae be a woman if it means big red pimples on ma face,’ Jean declared. ‘And she’s been awful crabbit as well.’

‘I have no’,’ Isla snapped.

Jean made a see-what-I-mean face.

But Niel caught Isla’s eye, and nodded in acknowledgement. He had shot up four inches himself in the past four months, was sporting wispy hairs in some very private places, and had a vague idea of what had happened to Isla, although he wasn’t going to mention it aloud, and certainly not at the table.

Isla smiled gratefully and turned her attention back to her dinner, hoping that Jamie and Jean had lost interest in the subject of her ‘womanhood’.

In case they hadn’t, Agnes changed the subject. ‘I couldnae find Rosie this morning. Ye didnae see her when ye were oot and aboot?’

The twins shook their heads.

Donal wiped a piece of bread around his plate to collect the last of the gravy. ‘She’s probably wandered off up the hill again. Or gone doon the other side intae the glen. I think she likes the grass doon there.’

‘Well, I’d like ye all tae go and find her after dinner,’ Agnes said. ‘She’ll be wanting milking by now.’

‘I’m helping Da,’ Niel said quickly.

Donal countered, ‘Aye, well, I’m only replacing those loose shingles on the roof this afternoon. And I dinnae want Isla and the weans oot and aboot by themselves, so ye can go and keep an eye on them, eh?’

Although he didn’t really want to traipse around after the twins, Niel tried not to look too pleased with himself. His brother and sisters were unlikely to get lost as they were only going up the hill, but there was a possibility that they might encounter, say, a Maori scouting party, so this was a real show of faith from his father, especially as the threat of danger was very real.

There had been unrest last year over the coveted Peka Peka Block at Waitara, north of New Plymouth, six hundred acres of prime land straddling the Waitara River and owned by the local Maori tribe, Te Ati Awa. When a minor chief, Te Teira, had tried to sell the block to the government, his elder and supporter of the new Maori King movement, Wiremu Kingi, opposed the sale and occupied the land in protest.

As a result, government surveyors had been denied access, and two weeks ago martial law had been declared in Taranaki. Two companies of the 58th and 65th Regiments already in the area were now on full alert, the Volunteer Rifles had been stood to arms, and the militia called up. But not Donal McKinnon, much to Agnes’s relief; because Braeburn was more than twenty-five miles from the New Plymouth police office, Donal was exempt. New Plymouth itself was preparing for a siege.

More alarming still were the rumours that local Maori were readying for war and building fighting pa. A passing traveller last week had said that many settler families were moving into town, too frightened to stay on their isolated blocks of land and perhaps face the marauding Maori on their own. Apparently, the McBrides had already gone. The level of panic in New Plymouth was intense, because the town was so cut off from other European settlements. If the imperial troops of the British army failed to stop the Maori, who would rescue the settlers? Who would stop their homes from being torched and their stock being stolen? Most importantly, who would save them from certain, terrible death at the hands of the bloodthirsty natives?

Niel himself was frightened of the Maori, with their fierce dark faces and strange language, but his father had said many times that Braeburn, which wasn’t part of the Peka Peka Block, had been bought fair and square and therefore wasn’t subject to dispute. This hadn’t eased Niel’s fears at all, but if his father thought he was up to confronting trespassers on McKinnon land, even disgruntled Maori ones, then he would.

‘Can I take the rifle?’ he asked.

‘Aye. But be verra careful wi’ it.’

‘Aye, I will.’ Pretending nonchalance, Niel nevertheless experienced an uncomfortable flutter of nerves in his belly at the responsibility of it all.

After dinner, Isla and Jean cleared the table, then Agnes took the washing basin down from a shelf and followed the children outside.

At the pump in the yard, she said, ‘Now, be careful, aye? If ye see anyone—anyone at all—you’re tae run back tae the hoose as fast as ye can. And Rosie will just have tae make her own way home.’

Their anticipation of an adventure tempered by the obvious concern in their mother’s voice, the children all nodded gravely.

Donal came out then, his rifled musket balanced easily in his hand. It was an Enfield, a military weapon only a few years old and purchased from a shady character in the Red House Hotel in New Plymouth. He passed it, along with a pouch containing the paper cartridges, to Niel. ‘It’s no’ loaded, so if ye hear anything, dinnae forget.’

Niel took the rifle and set the butt on the ground, the end of the barrel reaching his shoulder. Donal suppressed a smile at the look of pride his son couldn’t quite keep off his face.

‘Be canny, now,’ he warned as his children turned to go.

Followed by a bounding and excited Laddie, Isla led the way until she reached the trees at the base of the big hill that rose behind the house. There, she turned and lifted her hand to her parents, who were standing very still by the pump, her father’s hand resting companionably on her mother’s shoulder. They looked as though they were posing for the man who operated the photographic parlour in New Plymouth.

‘Look oot for them, Isla!’ her father called.

‘I’m tired,’ Jean whined to Niel. ‘Will ye carry me?’

‘No, we’re no’ even halfway up yet.’

‘But I’m tired!’

‘Well, ye shouldnae have come, then!’

Isla moved up beside Jean and took her hand. ‘Shall I pull ye?’

Grumpily, Jean acquiesced and allowed Isla to drag her up through the ferns and scrub covering the hill.

‘Rosie!’ Jamie shouted yet again, his voice cracking with the effort. ‘Where in hell is she?’

Jean’s eyes widened. ‘Ooh, I’m tellin’ Mam ye said that.’

Jamie ignored her because his da said it all the time and no one told him off, and went on looking behind slender tree trunks and low bushes, as though fat, lumbering Rosie could somehow have concealed herself behind them.

It was cool in the shade of the taller ferns and trees, and Isla enjoyed the feeling of warmth on her head and arms whenever she emerged into the sunlight. She was puffing gently, and a lone bead of sweat trickled down her scalp through her hair. The dull, tugging sensation in her belly had subsided slightly during dinner, but now that she was exerting herself it had started again. Stopping for a moment, she glanced over her shoulder, but they weren’t high enough yet to afford a view of their house down on the flat. She loved seeing it from here—it looked so like a little doll’s house that she always wanted to laugh. The hill wasn’t high enough for them to see the sea, but she always knew it was there, beyond the horizon; she could feel it.

‘Well, she wis here no’ so long ago,’ Niel noted, looking down: at his feet was a fresh cow pat. Laddie sniffed at it interestedly.

‘How d’ye ken it’s Rosie’s?’ Jamie asked, the toe of his boot seeming to move of its own accord towards the splatter of cow shit.

Isla hissed and pulled him sharply back by his sleeve. ‘Dinnae stand in it, ye mucky lad!’

Jamie and Jean both giggled.

‘The herd’s in the back paddocks, that’s how I ken,’ Niel said testily. ‘None o’ them have been up here for weeks.’

‘They might have crept up here,’ Jean suggested. ‘One night. In the dark. When we wasnae looking.’

Niel gave her a withering look and set off again, thrusting springy stems of supplejack out of his way as he went.

Twenty minutes later, all red-faced and sweaty now, they reached the top of the hill. Isla looked down at the house, delighted as always with the tiny tendril of smoke drifting from the chimney, the miniature washing line and outhouse and the barest smudge of garden. And there was no sound at all, except for the faint noise of the bush. Once or twice when she had been up here, Isla had heard her mother singing while she worked in the house. She’d asked her father about it, about why she could hear Agnes’s voice from so far away, and he’d said that sometimes the wind would take a person’s words and carry them straight to the ears of someone they loved, as a special little gift.

‘That’s no’ true!’ Isla had said at the time. ‘Is it?’

‘Aye, it is!’ Donal had replied. ‘Go up the hill, and if the wind’s in the right mood, ye’ll hear all o’ us.’

And so Isla had. But all she’d heard that day was her mother shouting at Jamie and Jean for something, and her father laughing his big, hearty laugh. It had been nice, though, knowing that even high up on the hill she was still connected to her family.

But today there was nothing, so she turned away and crossed the bald summit to stand beside Niel.

‘There. D’ye see her?’ he asked, pointing with the rifle down at the narrow valley below them.

Isla squinted. ‘Aye, I can.’ Half-hidden behind a stand of toetoe, Rosie was stuffing her face with coarse, lush grass and no doubt giving herself colic.

‘Rosie!’ Jamie bellowed.

Isla raised a warning hand. ‘Wheesht! She’ll hear us and run away.’

‘No’ if she wants her teats pullin’, and she will by now,’ Niel said, slapping at a sandfly. ‘Come on.’

The four of them slipped and slid down the long, steep slope until they reached the bottom, where their boots squelched among the short rushes that masked a tiny stream running through the valley. Rosie watched as they approached, calmly and rhythmically chewing a mouthful of grass and ignoring Laddie as he trotted around and dropped to the ground behind her.

‘You’re a bad beastie, Rosie,’ Jean reprimanded crossly.

Rosie didn’t appear to care what Jean thought of her, and tore up more grass.

Niel gave a low whistle and Laddie crept close to Rosie, his belly barely off the ground. She turned her head and gazed at him mournfully, then conceded to walk forward a few paces before she succumbed to greed and snatched up another mouthful of grass.

Isla shook her head in reproach. ‘Get her oot o’ there, Niel, before she makes herself sick.’

Niel whistled again and Laddie darted up behind Rosie and nipped her fetlock. She started indignantly, then trotted smartly across the rushes and headed up the hill, her swollen udder swinging ponderously between her legs.

Jean announced, ‘I want tae ride Rosie up the hill.’

‘Well, ye cannae, ye’ll get knocked off under the trees,’ Isla replied.

‘No, I’ll make masel’ really wee, like this. See?’ Jean crouched and folded herself into a small ball.

‘Oh, hurry up,’ Niel said testily, stepping around her.

Isla held out her hand. ‘Come on, mo leannan, ye’ll get left behind.’

And then they heard it—a loud, flat, echoing craaack.

Like a gunshot.

Chapter Two

They immediately froze, staring wide-eyed at each other. All except Jamie, who said confidently, ‘That was Da, shooting something for the pot.’

‘No, it wasnae,’ Niel replied stiffly, and slowly held out his father’s rifle.

Jamie’s face paled visibly. Laddie’s ears went back and a low growl rumbled from his throat.

Then they were slipping and sliding and scrambling up the hill, a thoroughly disconcerted Rosie bolting ahead of them. At the top, gasping and clutching at the stitch in her side, Isla gazed down at their house, which looked exactly as it had less than an hour ago. But something was horribly wrong. She could feel it, and so could Laddie because now he was barking wildly.

She exchanged a panic-stricken glance with Niel then they were off again, Laddie streaking ahead through the undergrowth.

Then a second shot echoed up the hill, and Isla cried out as a great wave of fear crashed over her, dragging her under and rolling her over and over, knocking the breath out of her.

Jean squealed ‘Mam!’ and promptly fell over, her outstretched hands ploughing small furrows in the leaf litter.

Isla snatched her up by the back of her pinafore and set her on her feet, ignoring the wailing. She desperately wanted to be able to see the house, but now they were too low on the hill, so she stumbled on after Niel down through the bush. A few minutes later, another shot sounded, closer now, and suddenly they emerged onto the cleared land behind the house.

And there, they all stopped.

Ashen-faced, Niel held up his hand. ‘Listen!’

But there was nothing to hear, except for the call of a lone bellbird somewhere in the trees.

Niel took a firmer grip on the rifle,

Reviews for Isle of Tears

[debbiemccauley-2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Isla McKinnon and her siblings are taken in by Ngati Pono, a fictional Maori iwi (tribe), after their parents are brutally murdered by a pakeha neighbour. The Scottish family had been trying to make a living on their Taranaki farm. As Isla grows into womanhood the siblings become pakeha-maori. She falls in love with a Maori warrior and they are married but the death of their child is a period of intense grief for Isla. Then the iwi is swept up in the fighting during the New Zealand Wars (1845-1872) and the the loss of traditional lands through dubious means. Kingite Maori face not just the British soldiers and settlers, but Maori who have turned Queenite (kupapa). Isla relates the events in many ways to what the Scottish faced in the highlands, and has no allegiance to the British or their queen. She is separated from her family, captured by the British when she badly breaks her leg, and then eventually escapes only to be captured by Queenite Maori. I was especially interested in the coverage of the Battle of Gate Pa (29 April 1864) at Pukehinahina in Tauranga Moana (pp. 248-252). Many (not all) of the details were correct and it was great to see the battle written about in a fictional context. I liked the inclusion of traditional Maori practices and the exploration as to why things were done a certain way. A well researched and enjoyable read.