Beside the cooking trench where bubbling iron pots sent up their thin steam to a hot sky Darien's mind was clawing resentfully over her grievances while she nursed her bandaged leg and the great red-and-green kaka parrots screamed at her out of the puriri-tree. She had only tried to help Sally scald a little wild suckling-pig, and she hadn't cried so very much when the boiling water went over her leg. Not enough to make Sally ill; though Lady Lovel, hurrying over from the further hut when fat old Ani ran for her, blamed Darien, and for hours everyone had ignored her, and she was utterly famished with hunger.

But never would she go in the hut again since that stiff black rig of a Peregrine had boxed her ears in the doorway. I'll die first, she thought, feeling that that wouldn't take long now, and hoping that all the traders would cry at her funeral. A heavy hasty step sounded up the manuka-track from the Beach, and Darien looked round hopefully, clearing the red curls from her eyes. Perhaps it was a giaour out of the “Keepsakes,” bringing delicate food in a golden bowl to offer it on his knees with glances of respect and admiration. “Deign to eat, fair lady,” he would say….

But he only said: “How is she?” And it wasn't a giaour (who would have had a scarlet cloak), but Nick Flower the trader who—one felt quite sure—had never gone on his knees in his life, and the only gold about him was his hair.

“My leg still hurts shocking,” said Darien. Flower page 20 looked at her with his little blue eyes like gimlets, looked at the little raupo-reed hut polished by the sun like a brown snail-shell, said hastily:

“You shouldn't be here, child. Go over to Lady Lovel's.”

“I won't. She's here anyway. And I hate her.” Lady Lovel's black ringlets were so glossy, her cheeks so red, her bust and arms so big that Darien knew she was vulgar. “I dislike vulgarity,” she said, loftily.

“You little …” He stopped, a flicker of amusement crossing his hard face. “A young lady who knows her mind, ain't you? Come down to the Beach, then.”

“I'll do as I like. My leg hurts.” Flower scratched his head. The child should be out of this, but what would tempt her? Maybe all women were alike and he knew how to handle Maoris.

“I'm unpacking some new things. Come down and I'll give you a bonnet.”

“What kind of bonnet?”

Ah! That had her. What wouldn't females do for finery?

“A … a big bonnet with a feather.”

“Could it be drawn-silk? A green one with a yellow feather?”

“If I have one. What's wrong with your leg?” Here was sympathy at last.

“I've scalded it so badly I fear it will drop off. But Sally went and got ill before she finished binding it, and I've been suffering all alone.”

“The bonnet will cure that, I guess. Come along.” You damned little egoist, he thought, fumbling in his great side-pocket, looking towards the hut. For all his daily-growing hate of black Peregrine Lovel he greatly desired to offer an oblation to that fair gallant little lady of his, caught too soon in her hour. A young tender thing who should have been set in a gilded house, playing of the virginals instead of lugging the huge goashore pots page 21 from the cooking-trench, baking, washing, mending, bearing progeny to Peregrine Lovel. A child, running and laughing with Darien and the Maori children when first they came, and he knew her for a rarer thing than ever he had seen before. Now those sweet blue eyes might soon close in death ….

Sheepishly he walked over to the door, laid a small japanned box of the precious tea (near worth its weight in gold) on the step, and returned, so shaken by Sally's low moaning that he jerked Darien roughly to her feet.

“Come on,” he said angrily.

II

This blazing midsummer day of January 30, 1840, had uncomfortably betrayed Peregrine Lovel into the consciousness that he was not omnipotent, and it was (he felt distressedly) going to take him some time to get over that. For hours he had been walking in the moonlight on the little hill behind the raupo-hut, and he knew that he vulgarly needed to go down on Kororareka Beach and get drunk. Yet since everybody else was doing it, that would have placed him on a level with the herd, which he chose to stand above, besides being a secret confession of weakness which he could not afford.

Anger against Sally was mixed with his distress. He needed sons—battalions of sons—for the work before him which had become so threatened, so almost dislocated since H.M.S. Herald arrived yesterday in the Bay, bringing Captain Hobson to annex New Zealand to the Empire. With a bleak steady acquisitiveness Peregrine had seen himself king of this wild lovely country, sending out his sons to represent him far and near. Now England had taken the country, and Sally might not bring him even one living son.

Incredible, unpardonable treatment of a gentleman who had done so much for everybody. Staring down into the page 22 smooth dark harbour where the Herald showed a red riding-light, lying apart from the bluff whaling-ships, and the tall trading brigantine out by an island, he realized almost tearfully how very much he had done. Cleaned out that foul old boat-yard round in Matauhi Bay; set John to conscientiously shepherding the Maori workmen, who so much preferred smoking in the shade of the great glossy pohutukawa trees; put Jermyn to draughtsmanship and Major Henry to casting-up the charge-sheets; given Sally a child which she hadn't the wit to know what to do with…. All of them fed by his bounty, and everything going so excellently well. Until now….

Since the Herald had arrived yesterday morning (with Captain Hobson, R.N., and without warning) the Beach had done no business. Since Hobson had landed on the Beach this morning, reading England's Proclamation of Annexation in the little wooden church (with any number of Ordinances to follow), the Beach's principal business had been to get drunk. Those who were pleased got drunk but, it seemed, those who were not got drunker. Certainly there were more of these latter, yet Peregrine still kept his bitter Lent. He was afraid of what he might say or do if he broke it.

“God save the Queen!” John had shouted on the edge of blubbing with joy. Major Henry had begun his old braggadocio about Waterloo, and Jermyn said in his cool amused way: “Wants another dumping-ground for her convicts. How will that run with all your mighty schemes, my buck?” But Peregrine had said nothing. In this land of rag-tag-and-bobtail he knew himself the one real stability, the one man with a mind above drink, trade, and prayers. Gifted people (he was aware) live under a special dispensation of grace, making laws instead of obeying them; and soon Mr Peregrine Lovel would have been making laws for Kororareka Beach—the only part of New Zealand yet on the map, and nobody in England would even demean themselves by trying to pronounce page 23 it. Now England had spoiled part of that, and Sally might spoil the rest….

“Mr Lovel! Mr Lovel!”

That squawking female voice, so badly matching her bulk, was certainly Caroline. Peregrine ran towards the hut, his heart most surprisingly impeding his breath. “Oh, la,” cried Caroline in the shadow by the door, “I'm that tired! But Mrs Grant is so taken up with the baby.”

Peregrine stopped. “Boy or girl?” he jerked out.

“Oh, a bouncing boy. I never did see such a bouncer. La! I must kiss you——” A certain Mrs Inchbald having once explained her own countenance as Voluptuous without Indelicacy, Caroline had annexed the description as peculiarly appropriate to herself, and had, in the opinion of Lovels, been indelicate ever since. Peregrine backed away.

“He is—normal? Sane and sound?”

“Oh, excessively. Can't you hear him? I'll tell you when to come in.”

Caroline shut the door, and Peregrine stood suddenly limp. In easy and superior fashion gentlefolk refer to hell as something liable to be experienced by others. Now, suddenly aware that he had been experiencing it himself, Peregrine felt quite unequal to encountering Darien, rising up out of the moonlight in a preposterous bonnet with a still more preposterous feather. Despite the bonnet and a hearty meal in Nick Flower's store, Darien's wrongs had been steadily growing, but now she was in a position to patronize Peregrine.

“I knew God was sending Sally a baby. Ani told me. It's for me to play with.”

“By the Lord! I'll not have you meddling with my child,” exploded Peregrine, still the worse for his emotions and afflicted by far too many memories of Darien. Darien stood stunned. His child?

“You—you imperant bric-a-brac! What's it to do with you? Sally will give it to me if I want it.”

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Peregrine caught her arm. “Now, listen to me, you little devil….”

Darien set her teeth in his hand and jumped free. “Phew! How nasty you taste. God will kill you now for cursing me. I'll tell him to. God! God….”

Peregrine fled. He told himself on recovery that he couldn't allow noise outside Sally's door, but he knew that he had been fairly routed. Darien (who would never have come if he hadn't considered her as a future unpaid help) was very far from realizing her dependent position.

Darien let herself down with her back to the door. Her leg hurt and the bonnet was heavy, but she felt it as a moral support. “Over my corp,” she said, “only over my corp shall he get at that baby.”

But when she saw it in the packing-case she discarded all notion of fighting for it. “Let him have the thing. We don't want it,” she told Sally. “It's too ugly and young. My leg still hurts, Sal-volatile.”

Sally smiled faintly at the little firm-chinned face under the big bonnet, and went drifting off again among fields of daffodils where an English lark was singing. But the lark wouldn't stay because it was so hot; and between her and the shadowy wall she had so carefully pasted with newspapers to keep out draughts other pictures floated up, all blazing with this strange bright sun that tired her so. Twists of hills like green shining silk, with the harbour between them like cut sapphires. Great bright parrots with cruel beaks fighting round the cooking-trench, where the black three-legged pots must be fed with wood or Mr Lovel's dinner wouldn't be cooked. Sally moved and fell back, forgetting Mr Lovel among the pictures.

Now it was a long war-canoe full of tattooed warriors and she was trying not to scream. Scarred whaling-ships, smelling of their trade, came crowding with their smell into the room. Even a whaling-ship should know better than to incommode a lady…. There was a tall trading-brig spreading its white wings, flying back to England. page 25 Oh, take me, cried Sally soundlessly. I'm so afraid of this place and there will be cowslips in the meadows….

Jermyn said Kororareka Beach was something you couldn't believe, especially when you saw it. Sally saw it, burning with colour, its little huts at all angles, like drunken witches clinging to their broomsticks, its noisy crowds weaving dizzily, Maori girls spinning their poi-balls…. How the gulls screaming over the piles of refuse along the sand made one's head ache…. Caroline was coming ashore from the Claribel on old fat Miri's brown shoulders, then standing on the Beach with her skirts rucked up like a flustered hen. Sally shook weakly with laughter. There had never been anything funnier than Caroline, spellbound at the naked Maoris and apparently thinking (like Miranda), “Oh, brave new world that has such people in it,” until suddenly she gave a kind of bellow and dropped in a faint…. Now Sir John was dragging the purple feather from her bonnet to burn it under her nose, and Caroline was coming to in a hurry and slapping him….

So hot … She must be under the heavy blazing weight of the doldrums again. But there were the grey seas mounting, and Sir John drying Belinda's napkins under his shirt because there were no fires, and she was so cold, and the wind was blowing out of Tilbury, and England for ever fading…. So cold her brief honeymoon in the Isle of Wight, with ghostly faces, ghostly voices coming round her in the night, telling her this is what it means to be a woman, Sally; with no soul or body of your own…. She struggled to get past them, back to the dear chintz room and the dolls and Darien in the big bed. But there was no going back.

“Somebody left some tea on the doorstep. I've made you a cup,” said Caroline, breaking like all the red and black queens in the pack into the pictures.

“Oh, thank you,” murmured Sally, always grateful. “You are so very kind….”

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III

Peregrine, beginning to feel better, realized that it was an omen from the gods which had brought a male Lovel into the world, his foot upon his native heath, to defy England in her very moment of theft. He must trim his sails to the new wind, swallow distasteful pills; but that wouldn't stop him now, he thought, going down to the Beach which was effervescing in the most unsavoury manner. It was red with driftwood fires, orange with the glow of lanterns outside the trading-stores, lit with gleams of teeth, of eyes, of brass rings in the ears of sailors, sham jewellery on the Maori girls. Everywhere sounded a great chorus of damns for Hobson and England, loud alarums about the Maori chiefs (who would possibly fight Hobson), traders being almost hysterical over this horrible talk of customs duties….

Jermyn was very happy, seeing life as a young man may. Yet he had had his private troubles with chiefs, since Hone Heke, holding chiefly rights over the Maori girls, had refused him Patea (who was nearly pretty) unless he paid through the nose for her and stuck to her, too.

“Damn it, sir. I'm marrying no Maori,” said Jermyn, very red.

“You can't get a nice wahine any other way,” said Heke. “And Patea's tribe will bring your shipyard much trade.”

Jermyn had no mind to immolate himself for Peregrine's shipyard, so he thumbed his nose at Maori morals and went foraging with Major Henry among those whom proud Heke did not recognize. But to-night there was better afoot than complacent wahines, with the whole Beach roaring against England and Jermyn beating out “Rule Britannia” on a Maori drum. Doosed amusing, thought Jermyn, to observe how the English welcome their flag overseas.

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Then unexpectedly he was on Corny Fleete's counter, having discovered that the Lord intended him to explain everything, and if only the counter didn't heave so much he could do it. England (he told that red ring of wavering faces) had come too soon. In another twenty years the Maoris would have killed themselves out with the guns so kindly supplied by traders.

“John! What are you about to allow such an exhibition?” demanded Peregrine, thrusting through the sweating crowd to discover John, glum on a rum cask.

“Stop him yourself,” said John sulkily. “But you'll need a gun.”

It seemed likely. Jermyn, weaving circles of light with a bright pannikin that slopped rum, was far too drunk to stand interference. So was the crowd. Best let the young cock crow himself dumb. But what a good-looking young cock, egad. His progeny should be worth watching, thought Peregrine, obsessed by notions of fatherhood to-night. A pretty fellow, with his big brown eyes and loose waves of fair hair and his manner of wearing the rough Beach dress as though it were regalia. It might be wise to make an ally of Jermyn, with his damnably clever caricatures, his reckless tongue.

Would gentlemen, cried Jermyn, full of oratory and his message from the Lord, remember that it was the Maoris who had first sent for the missionaries…. And if this bloody table would stop pitching like a catboat he could prove it. After some years of traders and whalers, haughty Maori warriors had apparently felt for the first time in centuries the need for moral support. So they had sent for the Reverend Samuel Marsden, who came to preach New Zealand's first sermon in this very spot … or near enough … p-pitchin' like catboat … in (wait now—he had it) on Christmas Day, 1814. “Hooray! Let's drink to good old Marsden….”

Laughter came easy to such as were still on their feet, and John got off the rum-cask to let Corny broach it. He page 28 wanted to go, but his broad shoulders and fists like hams would be useful if Jermyn provoked a row presently. John (who hated rows) found that Jermyn and the Major dragged him into so many … but a fellow must stand by his own blood.

Jermyn, still intent on his message, was explaining earnestly that England had probably her tongue in her cheek when she sent out James Busby as British Resident to the Bay of Islands in 'thirty-five in answer to missionary clamour concerning Australian and American land-sharks who were buying up thousands of good acres for a handful of nails or a gun. “‘Busby,’ said Prime Min'ster, ‘go'n stop all that nonsense, but don't come whining to us 'bout it. I fancy Cook left a Union Jack there some time in lasht century but we ain't inquired into that. B-bloody place has too many cannibals to int'rest us.’ Fact is, gent'men,” declared Jermyn, clutching at the head nearest to hold him upright, “England thought Capt'n Cook rather too free with his Union Jacks. So he was. And there's poor devil Busby sittin' in Res'dency over at Paihia with gunsh shpiked.

“… Long'n short o't is,” concluded Jermyn, recovering his balance with the solemnity of the idea, “England's 'nexed us to New S'th Wales so we sh'll begin prop'ly with p-penal law … shoals o'convicts 'riving t'morrow … and may the Lord have mercy….”

Through the infuriated hubbub raised by this, John plunged with determination; bearing Jermyn out among the hurrying zigzag of half-seen humanity, which didn't know where it was going and perspired tremendously in doing it; bearing him down the Beach where the air blew sweet and fresh from the bush about the little hut shared by Jermyn and Major Henry behind Bishop Pompalier's big cobble-stone house built for a Brotherhood which had never arrived.

Returning rather unsteadily along the Beach, John noticed a streak of yellow light lying across the water page 29 from the Herald, where Hobson would be closeted with Busby and Archdeacon Williams, trying to discover from them how to handle the chiefs. At how many thousand do you estimate the Maoris? he would be asking. But who could tell him? Who knew how deep they bred back in those great jagged ranges, those impregnable forests where no white foot had trod? Dang it all, who knew that every white on the Beach wouldn't be dead by the week-end? Even loyal John wondered if England was going the right way to work here. A danged haughty lot, the chiefs, and jealous of their privileges.

A huge shadow loomed up with a chieftain's mat over the shirt and trousers. Waka Nene … and he's a good Christian, thought John, blurting out: “Will the Maoris accept England, Nene?”

“Who can tell?” said courteous Nene, looking (for all his tattoo) more of an aristocrat than even Peregrine.

“Well, Hobson is askin' all the chiefs to meet him at the Residency on the sixth. Will they go?”

“Who can tell? My brother and I will be there to accept England. But there are many chiefs. I cannot say….”

No … nor God nor the devil could say, it seemed likely. Oh, my England, what have you let us in for, wondered John, trudging up the slippery tussock hill to his Caroline.

IV

To Caroline, who was constantly telling John what he had let her in for and who always came off best, since a lady can say what she likes while a gentleman mustn't, this whole New Zealand business was a rapidly accumulating outrage. Like other ladies of her period, Caroline had dabbled but lightly in history, geography, and such vulgarities, and she had blithely embarked for New Zealand under the natural impression that it was in Holland and also (with the strange adaptability of foreign page 30 countries) in Australia, which was down on the maps as New Holland. When she had found it to be much further, with cockroaches in all the cabins as well as in the tea, she had quite forgotten about being voluptuous and made the welkin ring.

For poor John it had been ringing ever since; but on the morning of the sixth she tied scared little Belinda into a white satin pelisse and tippet and arranged a blue fringed shawl over her own big shoulders, saying merely: “As you insist on us all being massacred over at the Residency, I hope I know how to die like a lady.”

Caroline couldn't do anything like a lady and never would. So John said, “Yes, my dear,” and took her down and put her into a boat with other Lovels, rowing out uneasily into the maelstrom with Jermyn. Even his big fists wouldn't help if the Maoris turned nasty; and Hobson had forbidden the assembling of the Lynch Law League—which kept such law as there was, tarring and feathering those who didn't agree with it, and had done quite a deal since Peregrine became captain. Hobson said it would be provocative, while being monstrous provocative himself, what with salvos thundering from the Herald, flags flying, and boats full of sailors and marines rushing about until the harbour seemed all Hobsons.

Peregrine was not there. Nothing could have detached him to-day from that miraculous scrap of himself that bawled so lustily until comforted by Sally's breast. Secretly he grudged Sally that power, since the woman's share in production is purely an animal process whilst it is the man, by his vastly superior qualities, who bestows on his children (both before and afterwards) all that can bring their lives to conquest. Peregrine, having no doubt of this, felt that his son should be already learning it, and looked sternly down the hill on blue water being torn into white lace by the passing multitude.

Swarms of Maori canoes wherein laughing wahines paddled with their long hair flying. Boats crowded with page 31 white-hatted traders and their gaily-clad Maori wives and children. Boats filled with top-hats and chokers, bright shawls and bonnets, fringed parasols. Naval boats arrogant with brass buttons, uniforms, cocked hats. Boats with bands trumpeting England's power….

“Hrumph,” said Peregrine, greatly pleased. Then the war-canoes scuttled him. Ten war-canoes, glittering with paua-shell and carving—ten, each rowed by sixty tattooed warriors, each bearing at its prow a stately chief in flax or feather-mats soft as silk and glowing with colour, standing upright like the god he was and so sacred with tapu that the rowers dared not look at him. From each high carved stern streamed long wreaths of the blue convolvulus, the yellow scented clematis. Each rower had a bunch of scarlet pohutukawa flower in his hair, but the chiefs had tall white heron plumes, like helmeted knights.

“Te-na-pu-u,” sang the warriors like a great organ chord. “Rule Britannia,” rattled the bands, sounding impotent and tinny under this vast sky. Peregrine turned in panic and dashed into the house. Chiefs, backed up by so much magnificent masculinity, would never be stampeded by Hobson and his handful of marines. Even a large military force couldn't do it, thought Peregrine, tumbling muskets and cutlasses out of a cupboard as though he were the force in question and feeling edges with an anxious thumb. Presently there would be the devil to pay over at the Residency … and then along the Beach….

With a dazed idea of saving his boy anyway, he went into the lean-to, frowning to see the child by Sally's side. “Roderick would be better in his cot, my dear,” he said, keeping agitation out of his voice with an effort. “Yes, Mr Lovel,” faltered Sally, doubting it, but knowing that gentlemen (being so vastly superior in every way) must be always right. She had, indeed, once ventured a protest about the name Roderick, hoping for Charles or Arthur. page 32 But the eldest male Lovel was always Roderick, said Mr Lovel, explaining that the Roderick of his family had been killed out hunting when only sixteen. “A gentleman's death,” said Mr Lovel. “I trust that all my sons will die like gentlemen.”

“All?” Sally had shut her eyes at that. How many sons would Mr Lovel require to make “all”? How often must she endure these terrible months again while she went on baking, washing, mending, scrubbing sugar-mats for the floors, pasting newspapers (which cracked again with every wind) on the walls, trying to make meals from eternal maize-flour and goat-flesh? Once she had put caraway-seeds in the goat-flesh to make it tasty, and it had been so tasty that Mr Lovel hadn't spoken to her for three days. And then Darien had filled his boots with caraways….

How wonderful to fear life so little as Darien, going off proudly to the Residency in that dreadful green bonnet with the magenta feather. Quite evidently designed for Maoris, said Mr Lovel, outraged. But Darien loved it, though she had bitten Nick Flower when he had wanted a kiss for it.

Now she was gloriously adding her mite to the rage of colour about her in the harbour. Gay scarves and shawls floating, gold lace of officers, top-hats gleaming, flax and feather mats like rainbows tied with vermilion woollen tassels, beautiful bronze legs and arms, dyed dog-hair fringes round the carved ceremonial taiahas held by the chiefs. Here came Corny Fleete God-blessing the Queen out of the rum-bottle until his brown half-caste children expected to see her descend from heaven any minute. And his proud Maori wife had the huia feathers of a chieftainess in her hair.

“Hooray!” shouted Darien, leaning over to wave, and becoming quite intoxicated at sight of the big red and white marquee shining like a bubble on Mr Busby's lawn. “Hooray for everything!”

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“Kindly keep your mouth shut, Darien,” said Jermyn presently, pushing her down on a trestle-seat inside the marquee. “Remember that one laugh from you may kill us all.”

V

It appears that during the 1820's and 1830's the Colonial Office in London's Downing Street was much disgruntled, seeing that England (so pleased when her restless sons took themselves off to the horizons) invariably discovered them turning round and making an Empire of her. There was that infernal East India Company, complained the Colonial Office, trying to entangle us; and Stamford Raffles imploring us to hold on to Singapore—a worthless mud-flat; and Australia clamouring for protection and her own way. Now the mail was full of letters from this pestilential New Zealand, too cannibalistic for convicts and too far off for a summer resort. So the sensible thing was to pigeon-hole the letters—until one came forwarded through her Gracious Majesty.

Busby was responsible for that letter. It had seemed to him a good idea to get a handful of Christian chiefs to explain matters to Queen Victoria, thereby startling the poor young thing into the understanding that if she didn't want a holocaust she had better hustle. So she hustled until the Colonial Office grew hot under the collar, saying: “Let the blighters have it, then. We'll cook their goose. We'll send out a few Regulars to clean the place up and then ship them our convicts, since Australian prisons seem to be getting rather crowded.”

They had sent Hobson to put the Islands under the jurisdiction of New South Wales, so that they could begin properly with penal law; told him to make himself Governor or anything he liked, and hoped to forget him until he should write that he was ready for convicts. But Hobson, even before that uneasy night following the page 34 signing of the Waitangi Treaty, had begun to suspect that he would not be writing very soon.

As for the Beach, slowly beginning to take in what had happened in the marquee, where only Waka Nene and his giant brother Patuone had stopped a bloody stampede and coaxed the chiefs into signing, there was not enough rum in all the casks to comfort them. Never before had there been such a colonization, such an unbelievable outrageous Treaty. New Zealand was given to the Maoris. All her “fair lands, forests and fisheries” were for Maoris for ever and ever, and proud unprincipled Englishmen were merely tenants.

“Defy the Treaty! Defy it!” bellowed Major Henry who had found the lack of laws and taxes amazingly pleasant. “Let us rise against injustice,” he shouted, bursting out of his orange silk waistcoat and waving his arms from a stool, which presently spilt him into the trampling crowd in Nick Flower's store.

“It must be a mistake,” pleaded John to the most blasphemous. “England would never let us down like this. I assure you, gentlemen….”

Jermyn, cross-legged on a pile of potato-sacks, was drawing faces (dangerous bewildered drunken faces) in the light of a hurricane-lamp, while old Captain Mackerrow on the counter was being loudly profane in his red beard. “Goddam them all. We didn't come here … taking our lives in our hands … to be jockeyed like this….”

From his task of serving out rum Nick Flower looked round now and then, grimly amused. Especially he looked at the Lovels and more especially at Peregrine Lovel, now so surprisingly standing on the counter waiting for Mackerrow to stop. A self-made autocrat, that; so spruce and spare in his wine-colour coat and buff waistcoat (Beach clothes were not good enough for him); so damned sure of himself, with his long fighting chin and narrow eyes; page 35 so loftily unconscious that he was own brother to Nick Flower the trader on the wrong side of the blanket….

Contemptuous of favours or insults, Nick Flower would never tell him nor the other Lovels—who were no more than Peregrine's tools anyway. But between himself and Peregrine their similar hot conquering blood was bad already, though Peregrine meant to conquer with a high hand and accompanying drums and trumpets, and Flower was content to use any method at all.

It was, Flower conceded, inevitable that he should hate Peregrine; partly for his arrogant success, but chiefly (since such small things may move a man deepest) for his right to wear that signet-ring with the Lovel crest. As a little boy Flower had played with Sir Roderick's ancient heirloom, not knowing that it could never be his. Now it was Sir John's, but Peregrine wore it, as he wore the high Lovel manner the bunch of seals at his fob. There, gleaming on the long well-kept hand, was the gage which Nick Flower couldn't take up and so could never forget.

Mackerrow ran down with a last oath, buried his red beard in a foaming mug, and Peregrine moved forward. “Gentlemen,” he said, smiling his thin smile, conscious of all that courteous voice could do. Jermyn stayed his pencil. Peregrine, always mistaking rhetoric for argument, amazingly bamboozled folk, but it would be hard to bamboozle a way out of this impasse. Peregrine had no doubts. England would certainly get round the Treaty. Even he was learning to get round things, and she had had much more practice.

The land (he reminded these gaping ruffians) always was the Maoris' and we had always had to buy from them, hadn't we? Men, having forgotten that, looked at each other, and Jermyn saw the bamboozlement beginning. Now, said Peregrine, looming like some great eagle up in the shadows, by the simple device of ceremonially giving the Maoris what was already theirs we had opened the page 36 way to negotiation; we had ensured that all future deals should go through the Governor….

“Each of us is aware how chiefs are apt to look the other way when a troublesome Maori chooses to upset a deal, and how we have no redress. Chiefs will not dare play that game with the Governor. We shall have all the land we wish for now, and England has acted with a subtlety and skill of which we may well be proud.”

“She ain't subtle,” shouted John, his blue eyes fire in his ruddy face. “I'll swear she's actin' honestly and….”

“And with her usual acumen. I think all gentlemen present have sufficient statesmanship to recognize how brilliantly clever her handling of the situation has been.”

Jermyn laughed while John choked with anger and distress. Dang it, Peregrine must be hinting at double-dealing if he talked of statesmanship.

“England for ever,” John shouted, banging his huge fist on a tub.

Gentlemen endeavouring to be conscious of their statesmanship looked anxiously for further guidance, and Peregrine was not loath to give it. All power was now in the hands of the Governor, who would certainly see that we did not come off second-best….

“Oh, my God! He's swearin' away England's honour now,” groaned John, mopping a hot and distracted face. But no one heeded him, they were listening to Peregrine. “In a few well-chosen words,” murmured Jermyn, who had already brought out occasional broadsheets on the Mission hand-press, “Mr Peregrine Lovel convinced bewildered citizens that all was for the best, and received loud acclaims of approval.”

“Come home, boy. I've drunk enough,” said Major Henry, who had a habit of becoming sober and pensive after three bottles.

But citizens (growing ever more bewildered) wouldn't go home; toasting Peregrine, toasting England—who had been so much smarter than they guessed; toasting their page 37 own powers of statesmanship, until the greater number lay with the tramped earth and dregs of liquor on the floor, muttering amicable good-nights.

With the gentlemen gone, Nick Flower looked down upon the disordered remainder. He liked to see men with their masks off, giving themselves away, as he never did, as Peregrine Lovel never did. Lord, Lord, these strange beast-men, child-men born of women … what an ugly joke this game of Life could be.

“Lie there, hogs,” he said pleasantly, blowing out the hurricane-lamp.