La Rochelle's Road

By Tanya Moir

This is a story of settling in a new land, of hardship, resilience and of love.

In 1866, Daniel Peterson and his family give up their comfortable life in London for an unseen farm on Banks Peninsula. Daniel plans to make a fortune growing grass-seed; until he does so, there can be no going back. But the realities of a remote hill country block are very different to the cosy imaginings of a clerk. The Petersons find themselves at the mercy of the land, the weather and their few neighbours - a motley, suspicious assortment of old whalers, escaped convicts, wary French settlers and true-blue Tory squatters. Even their own house has a secret to hide - that of its first inhabitant, the scandalous Etienne La Rochelle and his Maori lover. When Daniel's daughter Hester discovers La Rochelle's journal, it leads her on a journey of discovery - a path into a world of beauty, darkness and illicit love, which she may follow if she dares.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
• Release date: Apr 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781869793395

Book preview

Part 

One

One

The light hurts Hester Peterson’s eyes. She wishes, now, that she had set her chin less high, or chosen to look elsewhere. Below the tip of her nose she can just make out her father’s hand on the globe, and the blurry shape of her brother’s knee.

‘Five seconds more,’ Mr Gilberthorpe soothes, from behind the camera.

The Petersons are arranged against a woodland backdrop, in which a classical temple decays prettily under the assault of Nature. Hester’s father had wanted a pastoral scene. But there had been no chance to change it.

‘Woodland this week,’ Gilberthorpe had said firmly. ‘If it’s fields you want, you’ll have to come back next Wednesday.’

The Petersons had smiled at each other. ‘Can’t do that, I’m afraid,’ said Daniel. ‘We have another engagement.’

Grandma Williams had sniffled a little, and Hester’s mother had squeezed her hand.

‘Woods it will have to be, then.’

‘Very good, sir. Now, if I might ask you not to move the Corinthian column.’

Daniel had placed the globe on the papier-mâché ruin with obedient care. Gilberthorpe had considered it, head to one side. ‘And your books here in front, I’d say.’ He looked askance at the copy of Darwin, and slid it under the globe.

Briskly, the photographer had composed Daniel’s other props: the seed-lip and scythe at Robbie’s feet, the seed-sower leaning on Grandpa Williams’ chair, and the ancient handplough behind them all, just in front of the temple background.

‘Excellent!’ he beamed, rearranging his lights a little. ‘Learning and Labour, eh sir? Very good.’

Letitia had smiled up at her husband.

‘That’s it madam! Lovely. Now, just relax your faces … look to your left a little, miss … and hold your positions, please.’

The final seconds pass. Hester grits her teeth.

‘There now!’ says Gilberthorpe at last. ‘All done. We have it.’

Grandma Williams takes them out for tea afterwards, to Langham’s across the High Street. Daniel pauses outside St Mary’s to read the placard around the neck of an old man sitting on the steps. ‘Turned Out After 50 Years’, it says, ‘Replaced By A Machine’. Daniel pays the man a whole penny for a box of Lucifers, and Grandma Williams purses her lips but remains silent.

They sit in the window of Langham’s and watch the buses rumble by while they eat fragile cakes with white icing and sugared violets. Daniel reads The Times, and shakes his head over a report on the Islington Demonstration.

‘Absurd, was it? This country will learn the hard way not to laugh at the Working Man.’

Robbie nudges Hester. ‘Let them eat cake,’ he whispers.

The afternoon remains sunny, and they walk home across the Common.

Five weeks later, crossing the latitude of Rio, Hester considers the portrait in the hot shade of their cabin.

Robbie sits on a cushion in the foreground. Her father stands behind him, with one hand on her mother’s shoulder, and the other spanning the South Pacific Ocean. Hester stands on her father’s left, behind the globe, On the Origin of Species and the collected works of Homer.

Grandma and Grandpa Williams are behind her mother, very slightly out of focus, already fading into the wooded English background. Hester fancies her grandmother’s blurry eyes to be touched with public pride and private disappointment.

‘It’s not forever,’ Letitia had told her, on the East India Docks. ‘You’ll come out and visit.’

Daniel had been watching the gangway. ‘We’ll send you the tickets,’ he promised, ‘after our first crop.’

In the photograph, no one is smiling. They all look a little disconcerted, with their farm implements and their Sunday best, while behind them flattened Nature tears apart a Grecian folly. Hester tucks the portrait back into her journal.

In a few months more, her latest composition reads, we shall have all the space and land we desire. The air shall be fresh, the sunshine kind, and the sea breeze shall move through the cocksfoot. In the cool of the New Zealand evening, we farmers of grass shall sit, and watch our fields grow.

She gets up. Her petticoat is stuck to the back of her legs; the air in the tiny cabin is so close and wet it is exhausting just to breathe it.

They have lost the last of the robins this morning. Its dusty-red body bobbed for a time in their wake, until a striped shark rose and took it. Hester thinks that perhaps it is just as well, for who would wish to disembark alone in a strange new world, the only one left of one’s kind?

‘Hester, quick!’ Robbie throws open the door. ‘Come and see! The fish — they’re fiying!’  

Two

They make land three days after their first sight of Stewart’s Island, the dead heat of the tropics long forgotten, and the icebergs of the Southern Ocean still chilling their dreams.

‘Arrived—January 10th, ship Matoaka, 1092 tons, Stevens, from London. Ninety-four days land to land. 110 passengers; Births 1, Deaths 0,’ the Lyttelton Times will report of them next morning, taking no account of the trail of feathered corpses left in their wake.

It seems right to Daniel that they should celebrate. In a hotel on the quay, still swaying from the passage, he watches his family eat ham sandwiches, and cannot help but count the cost in cocksfoot seed of each and every mouthful. Around them, the first-cabin passengers drink champagne and complain, in loud voices, of prices worse than Brighton.

‘It’s nothing at all like Brighton,’ says Hester in a low, accusing whisper. Daniel looks out through salty glass at the brown mountains, their surly slouch into the oddly coloured sea. His daughter takes another sip of tea. ‘It’s more like Broadstairs,’ she continues.

Below, the Matoaka’s freight lies on the raw timbers of the new dock. A party of officials moves along it, pausing to inspect what remains of the Acclimatisation Society’s ordered birds. The surviving thrushes and skylarks hide in their baskets, too stunned to sing; a chaffinch closes its eyes and burrows deeper into its English rush, while above the brown gulls brawl.

‘Such a shame,’ says Letitia, ‘about all of the poor robins.’

The Petersons leave straight after breakfast the next morning, the wasted sacks of cocksfoot piling higher in Daniel’s mind. Courtesy of the shipping firm Willis, Gann & Co., they have four tickets on the paddle steamer, and so are saved the three-day walk, which they have read is the worst in all New Zealand. This is the last favour Daniel can claim of his old employer, and he lands at Pigeon Bay owed nothing by any man.

The wharf is stacked high with sawn timber. Beyond it is a wide, haphazard scatter of houses and huts, their construction varying in ambition and completeness. The effect is rather flat; there is no church spire.

Daniel looks around. There seems to be only one way out of the bay, a track cutting almost straight up the mountain range ahead, to craggy peaks and a hard blue sky. He glances, quickly, at his wife, to see if she has noticed.

Letitia’s attention is elsewhere. ‘Look!’ She nudges Hester’s arm, and nods at a house across the road. ‘Palm trees.’

Daniel looks back at the mountains. A heavy silence flows down from them and hangs over the valley. He feels the quiet, despite the industry of the mills and boatbuilders’ yards and the cries of the sheep on the headland. He leads his family up, away from the sea, their footsteps echoing under the wharf, rolling on thick green water.

Letitia and Hester tick off their list in the little store. Daniel goes to the inn, and agrees a fee for cartage. The price makes his stomach lurch. He looks out at their boxes piled up on the wharf, and the publican shakes his head, as if to apologise for Daniel’s lack of choices. Daniel hands over his money, thankful they did not bring the piano. They carry what they can.

The climb is gentle at first. Letitia remarks on how nice it is to be walking again, after so long at sea. The morning sun is mild, and the fields a luxuriant green. They pause often, looking back to admire the view of the ocean, or the rampant growth of a strange new tree.

Daniel is moved more than once to quote his old favourite, Gerald Massey. ‘Come let us worship Beauty,’ he declaims to the freshening breeze, ‘with the Knightly faith of old …’

‘O Chivalry of Labour,’ Robbie continues, rather too theatrically, ‘toiling for the Age of Gold!’

As the road narrows and begins to rise, they come across a gang of men working to shore up a slip above it. One of the men leans on his shovel to watch them pass, and Daniel smiles and tips his hat to his fellow Knight of Labour. The man stares at him for a moment, and goes back to his digging.

Soon the road dwindles to a track, a steep gash of clay through stands of timber and charred fields. After three months of disuse, the muscles in Daniel’s legs are beginning to shake, and he thinks that the ropes of the box he has tied to his back might cut right through him. He pauses only for breath, and to wait for Letitia and Hester, who are falling behind.

‘Nearly there,’ he tells them.

Hester glares up at him. She is bent over, her breathing ragged, her hands on her knees. Daniel gives her a confident smile. But he has lost all track of time, and distance; he does not know how far they have to go, or how many hours of light remain in this foreign sky. As they climb out of the shelter of the valley, the sun cools and a strong wind begins to blow.

‘Oh!’ says Letitia, as they sight the top of the ridge. ‘Thank goodness!’

At the summit, Hester drops the box from her back and sits down on it. The wind knocks her bonnet from her head. Before them, a long harbour lies blue and unruffled, its little bays dotted with homesteads and hedgerows and tidy, square green fields. A good road runs down towards it. Daniel looks up at the sky. The sun is still high, and bright.

He takes a deep breath, and waves his hand at a track rising into the rocks to their left. ‘This way!’ he says. They see the turning to La Rochelle’s Road in the late afternoon, the nor’west wind making sails of skirts and coats, and a fine dust all about them. For some miles the track has lain almost flat across the top of the ridge, with the sea to east and west far below, and a hint of white peaks in the distance. The view has been fine, and the going easy.

Daniel has them singing an Arthur Sullivan tune from the last show they saw in London. ‘Hush a bye bacon, on the coal top … till I awaken, there will you stop.’ He holds the deed of sale rolled tight in his hand, waving it like a baton.

They look down, at last, on the forty acres he has purchased; the first land, to his knowledge, owned by any of his name. The sight of it knocks the wind from Daniel’s lungs.

‘There must be some mistake,’ Letitia says into the silence.

The Petersons look around. But there is no other road.

To either side of La Rochelle’s Road is a wilderness, straggling down to meet the sea. At its end, they can see the iron roof of a cottage rising from the scrub. Beyond that, the land stops abruptly, cut off by the vast blue wall of the Pacific Ocean.

Robbie puts down his case of books. ‘Where are the fields?’ he says.

Three

A grey light is growing on Hester’s pillow. It is filled with the wash of the sea, and for a moment she imagines herself back in her bunk on the Matoaka. She rolls over and looks out of the bare window. She sees strange hills, resolving slowly out of darkness.

Closer, the weedy forest is stirring. It sways with the chatter and whistle of birds, warming with the morning. Out of the racket comes a single call, the notes clear and delicate, like the refrain from The Magic Flute. Hester tries to replay them, fingers seeking the final chord among the roses of her quilt. She thinks she will write them down for Lucy. A rude honk disturbs her concentration. She wonders if the Matoaka’s English birds will find their way here, and if so, what they will make of such riotous manners.

She finds her boots and begins the long walk up to the lavatory. Green birds flash and whirr about her ears. One pauses, hanging upside down from a creeper above her head. The bird and Hester study one another cautiously. It is pretty, but its curved beak and hooded eyes look cruel, and she worries for the little finches.

From the path back down, she can see over most of their land. She is surprised at how narrow it seems. On the title deed, it had looked much wider. A trick of scale, perhaps; there is so much water, and sky.

The ocean is far below, but all around her, in the fizz of the sea-bleached air. Sunlight touches the top of the chimney, and the grey smoke sinks, beaten back by a rising breeze off the horizon. Hester watches the light spread along the front of the cottage. The pale boards flare like a struck match against the shadows of the headland, and the sea glows silver-blue.

In the kitchen, Letitia is struggling with the stove. ‘But what are we to do until then?’ she asks, on her knees, of the sooty firebox.

Hester pauses in the doorway, waiting.

Daniel sits with his back to her, looking out at a square of sea. His long white hands are spread on the table. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. 

Four

Our house has its back to the sea, writes Hester in her journal. Below us, the ocean spreads to the sky, twitching wide and blue and hungry. One would think it to be infinite. But we, of course, know better.

She has set up her folding chair in the shade behind the kitchen wall, where she can look out across the ocean. She is drawn to this wide and windy view, its promise of forever.

In this harsh new light, the weight of so much water soothes her eyes, like a compress against her forehead. The southerly wind throws up the boom of the surf. But from here, she cannot see the edge of the cliffs, and does not have to think about that giddy plunge down into blackness.

It would be better still to sit inside, and look out, but Letitia is attempting to bake bread again, an operation that does not agree with her temper, and the kitchen is the only room to offer a view of the sea. It seems perverse to Hester that just one small window should be employed to frame the vastness of an ocean.

The wind thumbs through her journal. She reads, again, the dedication on its frontispiece, in her governess’s professionally neat hand. To my dear Hester, on her eighteenth birthday — for recording her own Special Thoughts. Hester closes the cover. She sighs, and turns her pen at last to the letter she has been avoiding. 

My dearest Lucy,

I promised I would write you a faithful account of our arrival at La Rochelle’s Road, so here it is;— though I fear that you, too, will find it somewhat other than expected.

Hester looks up again, across rock and tussock, and stares for a time at the sea. 

First I shall give you what is good:

The cottage itself is rather pretty, albeit strange to our London eyes;— the only bricks to be found in it are those which make the chimneys. Its walls are made entirely of wooden boards, which were once painted buff, but are now rather blackened and blistered.

We have four rooms, with an attic above, reached by a ship’s ladder, which Robbie has taken for his bedroom. Below, Mother and Father have their room, with a window onto the verandah, and I mine, with a smaller pane looking east to some rather grand mountains (or hills, as we are learning we must call them). For the rest, we have a parlour at the front and a kitchen at the back, with a fine view of the sea, from which one enters a long, narrow space running half the width of the house and providing pantry, scullery &c. (You will be delighted to know that we do, after all, have a lavatory, albeit situated at a rather greater distance from the house than is customary in Clapham.)

Though it was still furnished, as we were promised, it seems the cottage had been unoccupied for some time;— at least, by any human. Upon our arrival, Father and Rob had to evict a family of rats from the pantry, and several birds from the attic, and there was much tidying up to be done after our erstwhile tenants before Mother would allow us to unpack our things. Now, however, it is quite spick and span, and the last of the birds have been smoked from its chimneys without accident.

I am sure we would be quite content in our new home, and prefer it greatly to our old Clapham terrace, were it not for the condition of the surrounding land. Where we had thought to find cleared pasture, there is only a dense covering of bushes, thorns and evil-looking nettles over the charred stumps of giant trees, and the rotten branches of smaller ones. I must tell you, Lucy, that it makes for a sad and dreary prospect;— furthermore, it must all be cleared before the grasses which are to be our living can begin to be sown, and who is to do it, and how long it will take, we have no way yet of knowing.

But there! It must be only a matter of time, and patience. When next I write, no doubt all will have been resolved, and I shall have nothing to complain of but an overindulgence of fresh air, fine sea views, and sunshine;— and, of course, that you are not here to share them with me.

Your loving friend in New Zealand,

Hester

Five

The bullock cart pulls up with their things before they have finished breakfast.

‘Good morning.’ The driver does not bother to smile. ‘I am Delacroix.’

On the verandah, the Petersons exchange cautious glances.

‘It is my house you pass, when you come here,’ he explains. ‘The last one, before you reach this road.’

‘Of course,’ says Daniel politely. ‘Monsieur … Delacroix? How nice to meet you.’

Delacroix nods impatiently while Daniel completes the introductions, and the bullocks stamp their feet. In the flesh they are not very picturesque, and much larger than Hester expected. Their leader returns her gaze with an expression as perfectly brutish as it is sour.

‘I think perhaps you want something,’ says Delacroix, as soon as he is able.