This surely was the beginning of the end, thought Auckland, becoming monstrous gay; with sailor-men making Loafer's Corner quite dangerous of an evening, and young officers climbing Jacob's Ladder for bets.

Caroline was preparing for another card-party. Although still tiers of crape below the waist, Caroline was alarmingly breaking out into purple bows and gold chains, brooches, and lockets above, and sewing peacock-feathers in her cap. “I feel it our duty to think of others,” she told Sally. “And I'm sure poor dear John wouldn't mind because I always tie a crape bow to each table-leg.”

John was now always “poor dear John” to Caroline; but Sally felt it was not he that was to be pitied, with the war still going on, since what might have been a rout in the Waikato if briskly followed up had resolved itself into another of Cameron's slow marches. And Auckland's Parliament squabbled fiercely with Grey over the confiscation of rich land and his lenient treatment of Maori prisoners.

Governmental ministers and settlers were all for confiscation and hammering the devils to the limit; while Grey, backed up by London's Colonial Office, which hadn't seen the work of years go up in flame, talked at large of leniency, and the army wobbled uncertainly between the two. Tamihana, chased out of the pa of his kingship and reading in the papers what Parliament proposed to do with them all, prepared for a last stand; but the unquenchable Rewi was at it first, entrenching with some three hundred warriors under the very nose of a brigadier at Orakau and quite unconscious of the immortality it was to bring him.

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The three Lovel brothers were with Von Tempsky's Rangers, part of the two thousand pakeha who surrounded Rewi's pa; and Roddy knew well how there would be little water in the pa and probably no food but raw potatoes and vegetable-marrows. Except in long-established pas with the house-proud women to fill the patakas, the Maoris never thought enough about the commissariat. But for days Rewi withstood the battering of rifles and artillery, and then Cameron, who had always so hated killing Maoris, pushed up a sap and invited surrender.

“To the General. Salutations,” replied Rewi politely. “The end of that. This is the word of the Maori. We will fight for ever and ever and ever.”

“Ake, ake, ake … for ever and ever and ever,” shouted his gaunt men above the broken palisades.

“Then let the women and children come out before we kill you all,” invited Cameron. But the spirit of Thermopylae was also among the women. Rewi returned their answer. “The women too will fight ake, ake, ake.”

“Then, for God's sake, let them have it and get it over,” said Cameron, wishing himself anywhere else.

Roddy, flinging hand-grenades, saw them snatched by the women and flung back, saw a tall wild-eyed woman so like Haini Fleete that his mind rushed back into the past and he could scarcely see for tears.

Wild shouting now, a thrusting of men. To the South the Maoris were driving out in a swift fierce wedge through the surprised regiments, spreading into the thick flax-swamp beyond. So it was “Cavalry!” now. “Rangers!”

Can there be a God? thought Roddy, obeying orders, plunging in the swamp to his waist, cutting, lunging at the gaunt weak fellows whose one idea now was to get somewhere and drink in peace. Such a savage hand-to-hand fight in the sucking smelling swamp among the tall stiff flax-bushes and the crackling koradi-sticks. Such a page 363 long fighting in the bush around, until in the coming night the greater number of that little garrison lay starkly awaiting burial, while their dauntless souls went with the little green lizards to Rienga.

“Ake, ake, ake,” said Von Tempsky, weary over the camp-fire. “Has there been anything like it since the days of the old Greeks? What madness makes you kill such men when you may want them to fight for you some day?”

“They're as strong as we are. We have to,” said young Jerry, very wise under a head-bandage.

Brian said: “Ake, ake, ake! that would make a good slogan. I'll take it back to Auckland.” And he did, so that cricketers and footballers shouted it and, fifty years later, Maori regiments, dying for England in the Great War, were still shouting: “Ake, ake, ake!”

With a broken leg Roddy creaked back in a bullockdray to Auckland Hospital. Mamma, so pretty and gentle in one of these new chip hats with dove-colour ribbons tied under her chin, came to read him Tiffany's latest letter. Perhaps Tiffy had found something to hold on to in spite of Sackville, in spite of Nick Flower, whom Roddy would have a reckoning with if ever he could find him.

Tiffany, it seemed, had found nothing to hold on to at first. She had thought some mad old pagan god must have made the Canterbury Plains, because any other would have had more imagination. A monstrous level living thing, sprawling dun-colour against all the horizons like some neolithic animal, breathing so steadily and awfully with the wind running in its tussock hair.

“I couldn't write of it at first, it was so much more frightening than crossing the rivers, though they were bad. But when we had to drive for over sixty miles across that dreadful live body that seemed as though it might turn any minute and destroy us, I felt as though we were adventuring into hell. Darien liked it. She said it was such good feed for the sheep.”

Roddy smiled. This practical Homeric Darien, turning page 364 monsters into sheep-feed. But Tiffy finally had found something to hold on to. There were lovely clumps of cabbage-trees, she wrote, and a tiny hill behind Bendemeer up which she ran every night to watch the sun go to his royal bedding behind the Southern Alps.

“The sun has quite a new array of colours down here,” she went on, “so gaudily grand that each time you can hear him saying: You can't beat that! Then he says good night and winks at me and disappears into his snowy bedclothes, which are everywhere six thousand feet above the Plain. So I come down, well content, to help the female half of the married couple cook supper, and listen to Darien attacking Robertson, whom she made overseer when she sent the manager away.

“‘Ah'm no drunk, ma leddy,’ says Robertson who has been away for a fortnight bringing stores from Christ-church. ‘Stand on one leg then,’ says Darien. But Robertson knows better and goes off to the men's huts, while Darien comes glowing in with bundles of accounts, which she nearly eats instead of the cutlets, she is so busy checking them. So I sew and read the papers and make candles and set bread, and we are both early abed since we rise at dawn.”

If Tiffy isn't happy she hides it well, thought Roddy, remarking that he would go down and see her as soon as his leg was healed, since papa with his prayers and politics was less palatable than ever, and wouldn't his little mammy run away with him too? “I'd enjoy an elopement with you monstrously,” said Roddy, light from the little diamond-panes falling faint on his white face and yellow head.

Another man had urged that with more meaning. But it couldn't be done, and Parliament was removing to Wellington at the beginning of 1865 and Mr Lovel going with it. And he was sending Jerry at once to Canterbury, said Sally, feeling how life was like the chain-stitch sewing-machine, never tying its threads. So many untied page 365 threads hanging round her. Jermyn, who was writing his book all about beloved England and beloving lovers, with smacks and spikes of Mr Disraeli for the gentlemen; Tiffy, who would have to gather up her broken life un-aided; Roddy, always going away; Brian, who had never been near even when she put a compress on his sore throat; Caroline, Sophia, Maria … all untied threads about a Sally so wanting to rush into life's dim perspective and challenge it. But it would go on receding until the end….