Outside the hut of cabbage-tree trunks plastered with mud (which was all Sir John had provided for her through four unforgivable years) Caroline was writing an English letter, with kakas screaming back in the grey manuka-scrub and a herd of Lovel children screaming at play round the cooking-trench—where Caroline still cooked reluctantly with gloves and a spoon so long that, declared Darien, she rarely knew what was in the pot.

“Even in midwinter,” wrote Caroline, “the sun is shining and birds singing in this happy country.” She paused with a glow of satisfaction. Never should England know what had happened to Lady Lovel dreeing her weird in the Antipodes; and already her hoodwinking of England had got her so far that she casually referred, on paper, to Sally's Roddy and Brian as her own. For Caroline, although looking as fecund as Dame Nature, said Major Henry, seemed doomed to produce only daughters, and Peregrine secretly saw the four-year-old Roddy as a future baronet and taught him history and geography in consequence.

The hoodwinking letters in praise of New Zealand were hard work, although Caroline always put on her best purple silk to aid inspiration; and so she was actually glad to see Darien, who had come for Sally's children and sat in a crumple of blue gingham skirts on the tussock. Yet Darien, tall enough at fourteen to be a young lady, should sit on a chair.

“You will soon wear your clothes out if you treat them like that,” Caroline said reprovingly.

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“I haven't got spots on them, anyway,” said Darien, staring hard at Caroline's spread skirts. “And I wish they'd all wear out, then Peregrine would have to buy me more … the mean wretch. And I wish we'd never come to this hateful country with its stupid men, and even nasty brown sugar so scarce we have to cook with honey … and the only milk is goats'.”

“A land flowing with milk and honey,” wrote Caroline, seizing inspiration hastily. Then to Darien: “I hear old Mrs Faber is dead. What of?”

Caroline always wanted to know what people died of. Darien considered the usual methods of dissolution on the Beach and gave generously: “First she got drunk. Then she had a baby. Then she was drowned.”

“Land sakes!” cried Caroline, gasping. “The woman must be seventy.”

“Yes. That's why she died.”

“You are not telling the truth, miss.”

“Well, I gave you some at first. Nobody can tell truth all the time,” said Darien, feeling that no woman with such big red cheeks as Lady Lovel's should tie purple silk bonnet-strings under her fat chin. “Major Henry says you're an oleograph and Sally a water-colour by nobody in particular and I'm an oil-painting by Sir Somebody and very like Lady Hamilton. Do you know Lady Hamilton?”

“In my position,” said Caroline, bridling, “of course I know everybody. I have foregathered with earls … accompanied by their countesses of course,” she added hurriedly, for one couldn't be too careful with Darien.

“I'd have liked them better without,” said Darien, getting up to take the children home.

What a world! With creatures like Lady Lovel knowing earls, and Darien having to be content with the Beach, which ran after her as if she were a cricket ball and never knew what to do with her when it caught her.

The Graham boys clearly considered affection another page 61 word for recrimination, and trading-captains (though showing emotion when handing over the articles she wanted most out of their dingy stores) never discarded their Maori wives for her sake. As for that odious wretch, Nick Flower, he had so mortified her that she would meet him no more in the flax-gully—besides, he was never there when she went now. And Jermyn never looked at her, although she had written, “J.L. is Appolo Belvedere and all the classics besides being a gentleman,” and left it on the table when she last took the children down to Major Henry's. What more could a girl do?

A wretched life, and so full of frustrations that by the time supper was done she felt the house couldn't contain her and she doubted if New Zealand could. She went out desolately, laying her cheek against the puriri-trunk and then clinging to it tightly with a dim feeling of being Andromeda on her rock waiting for Perseus to pry her off. The vast silence pouring from the stars, the vast loneliness pouring across the untrod hills were cruelly full of negations. Even Andromeda wasn't so lonely. At least she had the dragon.

Here came Perseus, although he might have hurried more. Nick Flower or Jermyn? Darien palpitated. But it was only Sir John calling with a message to Sally on his way to the Beach. Darien went in bitterly. Men could always do what they liked but a woman mustn't even get drunk. Praise the Lord for heaven where certainly men wouldn't be able to do any of the things they liked doing now. Darien knelt down to say a thankful prayer.

II

What with remembering that he had signed the Treaty as a man of honour and the more urgent knowledge that he could no longer abide the English and English hectoring ways, Hone Heke was most discomfortable in his great stockaded pa over by Lake Omapere, where in the pale page 62 shallow waters warriors speared eels by torchlight, and his tall carved palisades stood stark against the sky. The English, undoubtedly, had all been hatched from birds'-eggs, since they could have had no parents to teach them manners.

How otherwise (demanded Heke of his priestly to-hungas) had they dared send a handful of police across Cook Strait to the little settlement of Nelson, in the other island, with orders to arrest the mighty chief Te Rauparaha for refusing to allow the survey of his lands? Handcuffs for a chief so sacred with tapu and hereditary power that to touch his mat was death to an ordinary Maori! No end of little settlements now, all running foul of Maori prestige, Maori law; and though Te Rauparaha had killed a few before returning to his enraged northern territories it would, said the tohungas, after making the proper number of incantations, have been wiser to have wiped out the lot, and so Heke had better do it now, instead of cutting down flagstaffs which the English put up again.

“But I signed the Treaty with my sacred mark of tattoo,” protested Heke uneasily.

“Then what have I been smuggling you guns for?” asked Flower, who had walked the twelve rough miles to the pa because he really wanted to know. There could be but one answer to that. “E-a!” shouted Heke, and snatched up his taiaha and rushed out to the dusky square in the centre of the enclosed village. Here he strode up and down to attract attention and then, with upraised arm, shouted his imperious:

“Whakaronga mai!”

It struck all the work and chatter like a bombshell; hurling the people into silence; hurling them into squatting warrior-rows with the dark-eyed women and children behind, all staring motionless at Heke in the firelight shaking the long carved taiaha, shaking back from his muscular shoulders the brilliant feather mat, launching page 63 out into that flood of oratory which is as natural as breathing to the Maori.

“No te timatanga … in the beginning,” began Heke. Flower listened, grimly amused. Every Maori has to start with “In the beginning,” and will go on to the end if it takes him all night. If Heke went on all night Peregrine Lovel's shipyard would go up in smoke yet.

Gradually descending through the majesty and might of the Maori, Heke came at last to the white men who (he told those dark rapt faces) had the bowels and understanding of a shark. From top to bottom of Maori law and dignity they had blundered and befouled, and even the mighty tapu was not what it used to be.

Once, thundered Heke, a chief was too sacred to be named, and anything in the world was his if he chose to call it his backbone. Now that England had brought her infamous laws traders everywhere refused to consider as Heke's backbone a desired keg of tobacco or a tuparagun. They should be grateful that he asked so little. What, he demanded, had the Treaty done for them? Snared them like stupid pigeons in a net, so that they could neither sell their land nor buy guns without selling it. But traders such as their brother Flower, who understood the Maori, helped them to get guns. And soon they would use them.

Flower, leaning against a raupo-reed wall, watched with the critical eye of a surgeon those still rows of tattooed faces half-seen in the cooking-fire lights. The dark and terrible melody of those rolling Maori gutturals, moving even him, would presently wreck Maori control. And, it was generally believed, there were still cannibals back in the mountains. Heke undoubtedly had eaten many times of human flesh, since such was a chief's duty on the body of a slaughtered enemy chief in order to receive his mana—that power of which tapu is only the physical sign. In Maori eyes Heke was chock-full of page 64 mana as he marched up and down in silence, preparing for his next flight.

The black gods of old could not have been more evilly grand than Heke, with his kaka-beak nose (from Egypt, probably, and much prized), his white-tipped huia feathers standing up in the thick hair like misplaced ears, the deep whorls and lines showing indigo on his weather-hardened bronze face. And he had cause for discontent. He had lost many privileges … such as the levying of a personal tax on every vessel entering the harbour and the supplying of temporary wives to whaling-ships, which were now making their landfalls at Australia's Sydney in protest against New Zealand's customs duties. The English were breaking down his mana, and it was probable that in a little while he would no longer be able to kill disobedient Maoris with a look.

Yet when he spoke again he had soared above the personal. His lament, moving and melodious, was for his country. He looked into the future with the impassioned eyes of a seer.

“E-a! My country! Ao-tea-roa … Land of the Long White Cloud. The pakeha god is stealing from you all your own old gods. Where now is Rangi, the father of us all? What can Tane do against the slaughter of his forests? The pakeha is stealing from you all your war-riors, laying those proud hearts in the dust, turning those strong hands to common tasks. Out of the deep sea like fish at spawning time come the pakeha, thousands upon thousands. In canoes with the white wings of gulls, they are coming … coming….”

Heke raised his taiaha with its gleaming paua-shell eyes. “From the sky beyond earth's rim, beyond the first faint blue of morning I see them coming with their red faces, their greedy hearts. I see them swallow the Maori as black night swallows the proudest day…. And Ao-tea-roa knows the Maori no more.”

He drooped his head and one moan went through the page 65 assembly like a gusty wind. Flower nodded approval. Old Heke could be a hypocrite when he chose, but he was no hypocrite now. And he saw true. There's no place like home, and (be it never so humble) the white man generally contrives to get into it, ejecting the brown man in possession. Despite all the smuggled guns sold to Heke, Te Rauparaha, and other chiefs, they couldn't fight England. But they had provided Nick Flower with money to live on in their homes when he got them.

“Mawai … who shall foresee the end?” murmured Heke. Then, with a blasting yell and a leap, he became pure savage.

“Shall they swallow us? Oh, warriors, shall they swallow us? Oh, young men … oh, women who have suckled warriors at the breast, who go to them in marriage, shall the pakeha swallow us? Say!”

With a roar, everyone proclaimed a personal desire to do the swallowing first. And then they were all at it in a terrific rhythmic volume of sound, stamping bare feet in unison until the hard earth shook, rolling their dark eyes, lolling their thick tongues, blowing the great white conch-shells and the six-foot wooden trumpets until the fishermen came ashore in a hurry and little birds fled twittering through the scrub, pursued by the high unearthly shrilling of the tall Amazonian women urging their men on to war.

III

Since men (even savages) are incalculable, Flower merely shrugged his shoulders and went on weighing out oatmeal, nails, and soda when Heke again chopped down the flagstaff and was again persuaded away by the missionaries … and by Waka Nene, who most officiously insisted on answering for his brother-chief's behaviour in future.

“Now is my mana gone if you do it again,” said Nene to a very distracted Heke, who, having once absorbed page 66 the white man's Bible and found that it didn't agree with him, was not very certain about any gods just now and actually chased one of his priestly tohungas with the sharp point of his taiaha.

Nor was Governor FitzRoy very certain about anything. But he was so nervous that he rushed troops over from Sydney and up from Auckland, and rushed them away again, and took off the customs duties and tried to put them back, and generally convinced the Maoris that he was very much afraid of them. Which was perfectly true.

FitzRoy's panic would land them in war yet, thought Jermyn with all a young man's amusement for a very bewildered gentleman anxiously offering sops to a myriad-headed Cerberus. Why the devil didn't FitzRoy fight and be done with it, thought Jermyn, writing the Auckland Chronicle a letter which nearly got the paper suppressed.

There was, asserted John, something to be said for FitzRoy—only nobody wanted to hear it. FitzRoy pleaded that land-titles were too confused; and seemingly he didn't exaggerate, since all Maori land is communal, and personal rights could be claimed because a grandfather's nose had bled on it (a sacred matter) or he had had his hair cut there (more sacred still).

It was a good claim if a man's father had been killed on a certain spot, and a better if his father had been the killer … and how was FitzRoy going to settle that? Much better, said the colonists, have left it to the chiefs who never stood any hanky-panky. But London's Colonial Office (not having heard a Maori argue) blamed FitzRoy. And as for numberless immigrants living under boats tilted on their sides on the Beach because they were unable to get possession of the lands sold them by kindly English syndicates, which didn't trouble about surveys or titles—as for them, not even Jermyn could find words to express what they felt.

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So he wrote: “The Beach is at present a chapter of Gulliver's Travels and Genesis walking hand in hand, with Revelations to be expected at any moment,” and went out on the Beach to find it.

All kinds of revelations on the Beach at its strange shadow-play in the red sunset that passed so wild and soon. All breeds of men. A knot of trading-captains in thick short monkey-jackets and tall hats flinging a shadow as long as yesterday; sallow ear-ringed fellows from the Spanish Main, broad fair English and Norwegians, huge negroes eating peaches, lean Yankee boat-steerers and harpooners, nuggetty little breeds from Quebec, Maoris looking like Highlanders in the swinging flax-kilt until you saw the bulging tweed trousers below. Missionary work, that. The sign of a Christian. The Lord had surely a queer way of marking his own, thought Jermyn, going to drink rum in Corny Fleete's store, where Corny was announcing an addition to his piebald flock and trying to count how many there were now.

“You'll never know,” said Jermyn. “Come away before your sins—or your sons—find you out.” He took Corny off in search of adventure.

All the traders' lanterns were alight now in the tin sockets at their doors, belting the Beach with her scarlet girdle, making her more gaily Rabelaisian than she ever was by day. A randy girl, the Beach, like all lands in their beginnings, and doomed (like them all) to presently bear a dull civilization fathered by smug gentlemen overseas.

Corny was looking for a small trader named Robinson. “I have definite information that he is connected with the gun-running,” he told Nick Flower, who had nothing to say, having already said it down his skilled underground ways. The League was ravening for a victim, and the innocent cat's-paw Robinson would do as well as any, thought Flower dispassionately, lounging back into his store.

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“There he is,” cried Corny, dragging Jermyn along. “There's Robinson with that silly bald head of his. I'll punch it.”

The meek little trader standing below his torch didn't seem a probable gun-runner. Jermyn protested: “Are you sure?”

“I'll swear it,” said Corny, who would swear to anything after a few drinks. “Look here, you! We've had enough of that damned bald head of yours.”

“Yes, sir,” said little Robinson, cringing before the richest man on the Beach.

“Yes, sir,” shouted Corny, rapidly becoming quarrelsome. “The League is going to tar and feather you and run you out of town on a rail. Smuggling for the chiefs, are you, you bloody traitor?”

With a squeak of terror the small man darted like a rabbit past Corny, knocking him off his legs, zigzagging down the Beach to disappear among the dark huddle of stores.

“By God! I'll paste the swine for this,” stuttered Corny, picking himself up and looking more than usually like an English squire after a night out. “I'll lay he's gone to the skippers now. I always said the skippers were behind this trouble with their cursed raisin' of prices and stickin' together. Come on, Jermyn. We'll go to the skippers.”

Reluctantly Jermyn followed through Lambert's store, in which a couple of supercargoes were arguing with the clerk, and those dark bulks in corners might be bags and barrels or dead men. It was always dangerous to meddle with the skippers, and Corny, felt Jermyn, was not the best man to do it.

Traders' back-parlours were sacred to the gentlemen of the seas, and at Lambert's, pickled in the smoke of thick-oil lamps and long churchwardens, the most influential trading and whaling captains were used to gather. A mort of queer things were done in back-parlours wherein these tough scriptural sailors out of Cape Cod and Nantuckst page 69 and Stockholm sat like Assyrian kings with their grey goat-beards and expressionless faces, making (said the Beach) bargains not at all scriptural with the traders and—through them—with the chiefs. Powers of life and death they had, these skippers, who showed so many scruples on Sundays but always had the manhood to get the better of 'em by Mondays. To-night, Jermyn swiftly discovered, was not Sunday.

Better keep out of this, he thought, hearing the skippers agreeing with Corny that gun-running sure was a dangerous game and liable to turn the Beach into Sodom and Gomorrah at any minute. This, the skippers said, was the business of the English Governor.

“It's your business too, damn it,” stormed Corny, getting purple. “You're men of substance, ain't you? We colonists confidently count on you to help put down this damned treason … unless you want us to think you're backing it.”

The colonists, felt Jermyn, were unfortunate in their spokesman. Skippers liked to be courted, not confidently counted on. Captain Ephraim Cobb of the brig Osawanka caressed his grizzled beard with a slow hand.

“Sir, the Queen o' England has elected to make this I'il island a noo feather in her crown an' I reckon she'll hev to wear it as best she can. I don't reck'lect that she ast for our help when she chose to annext a country that was gettin' on very well without her. Maybe the chiefs are troubled at the way she's been clappin' on taxes an' interferin' wi' liberties. Maybe we air, too.”

Back in the reek other skippers expressed approval of Captain Cobb's statement.

Corny, full of clumsy bluff and bribery, could not move skippers, mulcted by customs on everything from flenching-spades to soap and sarsaparilla, nor trading-captains who sold less goods now that customs took heavy toll. They answered him unemotionally that it was for the League to deal with Robinson if they thought necessary page 70 but that for them to assist settlers in a foreign country might bring on international complications. This damning of New Zealand as a foreign country, whereas once they had tenderly felt it their own, so proved their depth of bitterness that even Corny gave up, promising to send Peregrine to them.

“He'll put some sense into you,” he declared, marching out. “There goes Hone Heke! Good Lord!”

Like a majestic Highlander the chief strode by, shoulder and loin mats swinging, the greenstone mere of royalty in his hand, a bodyguard of marching warriors behind. “Chucked his trousers too,” cried Corny, almost plaintive in his dismay. “And now he's goin' to the skippers….”

“Here's Peregrine,” said Jermyn, relieved. Thank God for Peregrine who always knew what to do. Peregrine, it appeared, decided to settle Robinson first as an example.

“These meek little men are always the most danger-out,” he said, walking up the Beach like a stork with a long shadow. “You say he knocked you down, Corny? That's enough to begin with. The League will attend to him.”

The cold Peregrine was almost excited, thought Jermyn. And no wonder, seeing how this long scandal over the gun-running had galled him. Now he had his scapegoat, though Jermyn didn't believe that poor scared little Robinson had anything to do with it. Yet maybe it would send the Lovels to Auckland before the explosion came and quite time, with ladies keeping carpet-bags packed and bundles of clothes by their children's beds these six months past in preparation for sudden flight.

IV

Yet the explosion got ahead of Peregrine after all, although Robinson was safely tarred and feathered and ridden on a rail, Nick Flower attending as one of the page 71 League members, showing no more than a proper interest. Since Providence has decreed that the weakest must go to the wall, it was not for Flower to upset her plans.

But plans were upset a few days later when Heke, with an energy which surprised himself, suddenly cut down the flagstaff once more and sent his warriors along the beach with instructions to frighten the English. “Do not kill. Just make them understand that we are their masters,” directed Heke, sitting tight on Maiki Hill as a precaution against missionary persuasions and wondering if Waka Nene would believe him if he said afterwards that his men had got out of hand.

Now we're for it, thought Flower, hearing the crackle of rifle-fire, heavy cannon-rumble from H.M.S. Hazard, stationed permanently in the Bay. He snatched down his cutlass and ran out, pausing to lock the door. Maoris never thieved, but the white men did … and here came soldiers and marines, pouring ashore from the Hazard, doubling up the Beach with a gleam of bayonets, of eyes. And here, there, everywhere leapt the Maoris like devils in a pantomime, like naked overgrown boys at play. War, for the Maoris, was the only real play.

So here was another weakest going to the wall. Heke, good man, had challenged England's forty millions, and the best he would get out of it was some practice with his guns. Nick Flower, ranging himself immediately among the forty millions, went up to rescue the Lovel ladies, unguessing how many sinews of war he would be smuggling into the country for the next twenty years.

Ladies, it appeared, are more incalculable than men. Fainting at a mouse they yet seem to relish danger, never playing the game that a man expects. Mrs Lovel, though white as a ghost, was filling a pillow-case with food, smiling at the children (“the little brave lady”), smiling up at Flower.

“Mr Lovel said he would send someone to take us to the Arsenal. We are ready,” she said.

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“Monstrous early for them to start this nonsense,” cried Darien, buttoning up Brian. “I vow I've had no time to wash the sleep out of my eyes.”

But her eyes shone like diamonds, and her cheeks were pink roses. Flower (always so moved by women) would have liked to take her in his arms. But he took baby Jerry instead. “And give me some of those bundles,” he said.

“Mr Lovel had to go to the League … Oh, thank you. Tiffy … Roddy … here are your bundles, dears.”

Pioneer children already knew that they must never be afraid. Stoutly they loaded up their little arms; stoutly joined in “Red plumes of the kaka” when Nick Flower began it going down the hill under the white manuka-wreaths, their red-and-white check frocks bobbing in the sunlight, and Peregrine rushing half-way up the hill to meet them. John and Corny could attend to the League while he got his sons safe to cover.

“Please God,” whispered Sally, walking with loaded arms beside Mr Lovel and seeing the startled Beach such a whirl of white-trousered legs, blue-trousered legs, and legs with no trousers at all, such a smother of smoke and flying sand and the reek of gunpowder, with the Hazard booming over all.

On the water-front the little munition store had always known itself for a possible place of refuge. It accepted women and children to the best of its small powers, while (battling royally in back-parlours, round the tiny white church, round overturned boats and great brown piles of oil-casks) the English were holding on. Peregrine, clattering with pistols and cutlasses, melted off into the reek, Nick Flower melted, and the door was shut. Caroline, weighed down with bags, bonnet-boxes, pomade-pots, trailing shawls, and a large magenta feather-fan, was somehow contriving to brandish a poker.

“Vulgar upstarts! They cannot frighten me,” cried Caroline, coming out strongly as a pioneer. Maori wives and children of traders had probably taken to the hills; but Corny Fleete had thrust in his protesting family; and page 73 down on the earth floor boys—white, brown and piebald boys—punched and kicked each other for the glory of their race, while little Hemi Fleete (his mixed blood asserting itself for the first time) fought Lovels, fought his brothers with tears running down his brown face. Gentlemen, so ready to leave such of their mistakes to God, had not considered the future of Hemis.

“They need hymns,” said Caroline and walked about among the crowded women singing “Hark, the Herald Angels,” and clearly considering herself one of them; while Sally fed everyone from the pillow-case and pulled a furious Tiffany out from the crowd of boys, and Darien tried to climb through a loophole to watch all these romantic happenings outside and see if any Maori had sense enough to kill Peregrine.

Then came a battered Major Henry, and big Bishop Selwyn (who was trying so hard to make the Beach respectable) and took them all off to the ships—which was a grave enough foreshadowing to silence even Caroline. Up on Maiki Hill Heke was perturbed. He would never be able to convince Waka Nene that it was only a joke. But when all the white men suddenly rowed off after the ladies Heke came down the hill in a terrible hurry. This was not fair. No sensible chief desires to get rid of such lucrative attachments as traders, and what was going to happen now?

On the ships outraged marines were also demanding to know what was going to happen now, demanding the name of the officer who had ordered the recall. “We could have held them till Kingdom Come,” they howled. “We could have beaten the devils. What will the Maoris do now that they find the whites running from them in their first fight?”

It was to be twenty years and more before the Maoris (heartened by that blunder) finally stopped fighting; but at present they were being very surprised along the Beach and not at all knowing what to do with their unexpected conquest. Yet there was loot in the stores. And though page 74 they didn't care for rum there was so much of it. And presently someone upset a lighted lamp…. So the Beach went up in flames, with tattooed warriors garbing themselves in nightcaps, petticoats, and other fancies very happily, while dead whites lay where they fell since everyone was now too civilized to put them in the pot … which was a pity.

“And all our best carpets and things never even unpacked,” lamented Caroline. But Heke, who was really a great gentleman, although Nene never thought him so again, put a tapu on most of the settlers' effects and they all came to Auckland later with the gear of Peregrine's shipyard.

Haini Fleete was demanding a boat to take her ashore. “I will go to my own people,” said Haini, tall and stately with her brood about her. Corny gripped her roughly by the arms, thrusting his blood-smeared face into hers.

“My people are your people. You'll go where I go, and remember that your children are English,” he said. “I'll stand no nonsense from you, madam.”

He had never taken that tone with her before, being an easy man. But the clash of these two strong arrogant races had now fairly begun; and each knew it and feared the other, thought Sally, seeing Haini turn silently away, and so sorry for her. Men (one supposed) called that sort of thing protection.

Young Tiffany knew that the sky chose to go mad every sunset and one couldn't do anything about it; but the Beach never had before. Yet here it was having a great and terrible sunset of its own. It was galloping with blue and scarlet tongues and a monstrous crest of black streaming hair; biting all the houses into bits; tossing their limbs up under exploding oil-barrels; running in glowing rivers to the sea. It gobbled up Nick Flower's store with its shelves of mysterious wonders, gobbled Lambert's….

Slowly they sank in dark heaps full of quivering flickers, page 75 and the fire went leaping on. The houses and stores couldn't be gone for always? Surely, surely there wasn't really an always that took things away for ever? “No, no, no,” screamed Tiffany, meeting for the first time the implacabilities ranged against her. She went charging down the deck to the dim corner where Roddy too watched the fire. To him that fierce and lovely thing was something one could die for, and he put his arm round Tiffany protectingly.

“It's like the Burning Bush in the Bible, Tiffy. I nearly saw God just now——”

Wind that fanned the flames was gathering in the rigring now. Tall sails filled, sweeping down the harbour to-night and the open sea. In a tiny cabin Caroline prepared for seasickness while her children had got ahead of her everywhere. In the corner under a lantern Darien scribbled in her diary:

“We are going to Auckland which is full of beautiful soldiers and men to run after me. I am very glad I was born and so will they be.”

Peregrine walked the deck with a tired Sally meek on his arm. Already he was busy reconstructing. He would call on Governor FitzRoy at once. Opportunities … Ministerial … Political … my chance has come, thought Peregrine, energetically walking Sally off her trembling legs. “Please God, let Auckland be easier than the Beach,” whispered Sally. It had been so hard to laugh at anything on the Beach.

“I think, Sir John,” said Caroline, lifting a haggard head from the pillow, “that I shall have a son in Auckland.” Her tone implied that she had not thought it worth while before.

The ship slewed round the Heads and turned southward into the dark. The first step in New Zealand's pioneering was over. But Lovels, thought Peregrine, glancing proudly round, were very well capable of taking plenty more.