Du Rose Sons

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

It wasn’t just the fact that Logan almost married Caroline, which affected Hana so badly, or the woman’s destructive influence on their early relationship. It was that Alfred and Miriam had knowingly almost allowed the disaster to happen. Reuben too. It was painful for Logan that Reuben and Caroline conspired to rip him off; organising a wedding that would never happen and using alleged debt from it to secure the flat piece of land on the mountaintop. Forty years of buried grief had made Reuben ruthless and dangerous in his desperation for contact with his son. But it destroyed everything, forcing Logan into legal action and financial ruin for his birth father. Probably all Reuben ever wanted was a face-to-face conversation, a traditional hui in which he would undoubtedly reveal his ace of spades. It was the one time Logan Du Rose had done things by the book and it had taken everyone by surprise.

Hana ran water into her hand and sipped it, hoping the sickness had finally abated, her hot milk long gone down the plug hole and into the septic tank underneath the driveway. And then she remembered something far worse and the retching began again. A recalled conversation with Leslie returned to her. “I see that that Marsh girl finally got her hooks into a Du Rose! You’d think that poroheahea Kane would ‘ave more sense. She’s been poison to them boys their whole life and now he’s stuck with her. She’ll be thrilled. Hankered after that name as long as she’s ‘ad breath. Wahine kairau!” Leslie spat on the ground with force, realising too late that she’d gobbed on the kitchen floor.

Guilt seized Hana and she pushed her face further into the sink. “I pushed them together,” she moaned, her voice echoing against the metal. “It’s my fault! But I knew he loved her.” The nausea was Hana’s punishment and she stayed there, trying not to think of gorgeous blond Caroline dangling the Du Rose men, including Logan, like a spider toying with flies in her copious web. Them and many others.

“Oh God, please forgive me,” Hana pleaded out loud, laying her sweaty forehead on her arms. Her breaths came heavy and hard won as she pushed the aged diary away from her, no longer caring that it was out in the open air and decaying by the second. It had morphed from a treasured thing to a cursed.

The obvious fact remained that in finally securing the Du Rose name, Caroline Marsh had unwittingly married her half-brother. Hana felt ill. She knew sleep would never come now. Her cell phone was charging in the enormous lounge and she turned the light on, feeling that same creeping sense of being watched. Drawing all the curtains around the room she grabbed her phone and sent a hurried text to the museum curator. ‘Massive problem with this last diary. I think we need to destroy it! Talk tomorrow.’

Will was in his late sixties and had been the archivist for the large marae in Ngaruawahia, which was the seat of the royal kīngitanga. Diabetes robbed him of his legs from above the knees and Hana engaged his services to restore the contents of Phoenix Du Rose’s treasures the previous year. When Logan approved her hair brained scheme to display the family heirlooms in an on-site museum, to her surprise he employed the disabled man to set it up. Will moved from Hamilton to the hotel while Hana and Logan were in Europe and occupied a room in one of the motel suites on the property. Logan employed Will’s son as his carer, helping him practically in his quest for normality. It was a blessing for the family following the man’s redundancy at the Hamilton sawmill. Will’s son was an enormous Māori man, terrifying to look at with his ta moko tattoos covering his face, but gentle as a puppy and tender with his father. Logan also gave him work as a groundsman.

Hana huddled down on her knees next to the wood burner, trying to settle her stomach and draw comfort from the heat. It was two thirty in the morning so Will wouldn’t text back until he started work and the fire was almost spent. She shivered, dropping her phone in surprise as it rang in her hand. Hana wasn’t even given the chance to greet the caller.

“You destroy an artifact in my care, woman and I’ll whoop your pretty ass all the way back up that mountain you live on!”

“Why are you up?” Hana felt the sickness of anticipation return to her guts.

“Because some damn woman started textin’ me!”

“Oh, sorry.”

“Na, me an’ me boy’ve been watching the rugby. I’m likin’ this Sky TV thing. Ain’t never been able to watch them international games before. This’n was All Blacks versus Springbok. They’s eatin’ dirt now them green an’ yellas. That’ll teach ‘em.”

Hana toyed with the idea of politely asking the score but she knew Will wouldn’t tell her. She had never managed to fool him yet and this was not the exception.

“So, what’s your problem, bro? And don’t bother askin’ bout the rugby cos I know you don’t care. What you wantin’ to destroy?” His voice sounded hoarse down the phone line. He’d probably been shouting at the TV. He had been known to get so excited that he pitched himself out of his wheelchair.

“It’s this damn diary of Phoenix’s,” Hana tiptoed over and closed the lounge double doors, a ridiculous effort as Logan and her baby were miles away at the other end of the house. “She’s said the most awful things about family members. If this gets out it’ll cause a whole heap of trouble for a lot of people.”

“History’s like that the world over, girlie. It’s the nature of the thing. Your husband employs me to take care of the truth and that’s what I’m gonna do.”

“I’ve got two choices here,” Hana tried to be firm with him. “Either I destroy it and nobody is the wiser, or I rip out the offending pages...”

“Rip out!” Will’s shout echoed in Hana’s ear and she had to hold the phone away and wait for the sound to finish pinging around her ear drum. “Don’t you bloody dare!”

“You don’t understand. Someone’s married their half-brother without realising. Oh dear God,” a terrible thought occurred to Hana and she sent up a further plea to the God of Heaven. “If they have children, it could be a disaster! Besides which, they’ve broken the law. Oh this is awful,” she flapped. “We have to destroy it.”

“You return that bloody book to me in one piece tomorrow or I quit! You hear me, madam? I’ll be inspecting every damn page and if I find anything missin’, I’m done here.”

Hana gulped and nodded, hearing a hiss of exasperation as Will couldn’t see her. “I feel sick,” she said, to no-one in particular and he humphed loudly.

“You will if you touch that diary!”

“Ok, ok, we’ll talk tomorrow.” Exhaustion settled on Hana like a shroud.

“Fine,” Will said with an edge of grumpiness. “Come to the museum and we’ll talk. But remember what I said, girlie. Touch it and we’re done!”

Will rang off, leaving Hana feeling no better than she had before. “I should have just burned it,” she said to the dying embers. “He wouldn’t have noticed.” But she knew he would. He was an incredible archivist and catalogued everything that passed through his hands. He would have missed it eventually and no amount of blagging would have gotten Hana out of trouble then.

Hana hid the tattered diary full of its damaging secrets in her underwear drawer. Some wicked part of her nature acknowledged the innate glee that wrecking Caroline’s new life would bring, but a bigger part urged the need for self-preservation. Whilst Caroline was busy in Christchurch with her new husband, hopefully not producing incestuous two-headed babies, she wasn’t pestering Logan or trying to destroy Hana’s marriage. Hana crawled into the massive four poster bed with her husband, edging across towards his warmth and touching various parts of his satisfyingly hot skin to see if he reacted. He grunted and shifted in bed, until she risked it and put her freezing cold feet on his bare legs. “Geez, woman!” he complained, wakened with a start. “Have you been outside?”

“No, I can’t sleep.”

“Well I was managing just fine, but now that I’m disturbed...” Logan put his warm hands up under Hana’s nightshirt and she giggled, her cares and worries temporarily pushed into the background, as her husband set about restoring her body temperature to a little above normal.