Du Rose Sons

Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Hana’s dream was peculiar, involving a ringing cell phone and some kind of lost cat. It was persistent, intruding on her slumber without mercy, stopping and then starting again for what seemed like hours. She gave up searching for the cat and allowed herself to be pulled from sleep, not surprised to discover the cat was unreal, but astounded to find the ringing phone was. “Yes.”

Her greeting was abrupt and there was a pause at the other end. Then he let rip, “Where’s that diary? I’ve been waiting for you for hours. Get yourself down here now and let me see it. You’ll be the death of me, girlie.”

Hana yawned and looked gormlessly at the clock in the right-hand corner of the phone’s screen, taking it away from her ear to do so. She could still hear Will shouting, “Do you ‘ear me?”

“I was up all night, I wasn’t...”

“I’m not interested in what you were doing with your evening.” Will sounded beyond agitated. “I saw your man earlier and I’ve got a fair idea from the smile on his face. Get your pretty ass down ‘ere and quick!”

Hana flopped back on the comfy pillows. It was half past ten in the morning. Logan had put her mobile phone on his pillow next to her, along with a carefully written note in his perfectly scripted left-handed writing.

‘Leslie’s got Phoe. You looked so peaceful and our girl was up so I thought I’d leave you. Jack fetched us so the ute up top with you. Come down when you feel like it. Thirty calves in two days, not bad. Only lost two so far.’

Hana rubbed her eyes, finding them crusty and horrid with sleep. Getting out of bed to get a shower she checked her bedside table. The diary was still buried in the top drawer, snuggled between a pair of sexy red knickers and a friendly old, greying pair that were actually her favourite. She kind of hoped it would have been spirited away in the night somehow, like an answer to prayer. Deliberately delaying her fate, Hana wasted time cleaning the kitchen sink she had spent half an hour barfing into earlier. Then she locked up, started the ute and drove down to the hotel, the diary bouncing carelessly on the passenger seat.

Will waited for her in the museum. His wheelchair faced the door and his arms were folded across his chest, his face set in a practiced snarl. He held his hand out for the diary straight away. “You look like crap,” he said after he had pulled on a pair of cotton gloves and checked the spine for evidence of ripped pages.

“Thanks,” Hana said sarcastically. “I told you I was sick.”

“Not on this, I hope?” He shook the diary at her and inspected the pages all over again. Hana sighed and huffed like a sulky teenager. Will moved his spectacles down his nose and eyed her with amusement. “What’s with you at the moment?”

Hana hurled herself into one of the elderly chairs along the wall of the museum. Her shoulders slumped and she ran a hand over her tired eyes. “Lots of stuff. I’m fine.” She indicated the diary with a stabbing finger. “That’s not helping! You have no idea how defamatory it is. I want to get rid of it. If you won’t burn it, then at least find somewhere to hide it, where it can’t hurt anyone it relates to.”

Will wheeled himself over to Hana and put a comforting arm around her shoulders. They spent the next hour discussing the diary and the implications, should its damaging contents ever become widely known.

“Have you ever stood inside and watched the rain pour down a window?” Will asked. Hana nodded. “A life is like that, see. It runs down fast, finding a way through obstacles, joinin’ with others or runnin’ alone. It leaves the bottom and is gone. The sun dries the window and there’s nothin’ to see anymore, except a faint trail. That’s what people come seekin’; that faint trail. We don’t have the right to wipe it out as though it never happened.”

Will placed his large, arthritic fingers over Hana’s pale, delicate ones, gripping them gently. A high blush of shame worked its way steadily into her cheeks. Will moved so that his brown eyes were close to Hana’s, forcing her to look at him. “Honey, we’re the guardians of the past, not the judges. And besides, e hara i te mea, he kotahi tangata nāna i whakaara i tō pō.”

“What does that mean?” Hana asked, irritated by the old man’s lapse into his native tongue. Will smiled sadly and drew his gnarled hand across his mouth. “Listen up good girlie, it means this: It was not one man alone who was awake in the dark times.” At Hana’s still obvious confusion he explained, “Never take one viewpoint for history; it’s dangerous. There’s always more than one way of seeing the past.” He waved the tattered diary under Hana’s nose. A small section of the fabric spine fell off and fluttered into his lap. Hana contemplated pointing it out, wanting the old man to know she hadn’t done it - he had. But her motivation was childish and she kept quiet. “I can restrict this for seventy years, or until everyone involved is dead. I’ll seal it and lodge it somewhere, but I ain’t destroying it, my love. It’s not how you safeguard history and youse know that.”

Will bobbed his head as he touched Hana’s arm lightly. His hair was thinning on his brown head and he had lost weight since moving up to the hotel. Getting to work for him involved great physical activity, wheeling himself down the road and up the ramp into the museum entrance. It had forced him to get busy and his zest for life was visibly increased. His wrinkled hands reminded Hana of her father’s, thousands of miles away in England. She missed him and the sensation bit with unexpected force, stealing the colour from her cheeks as she remembered the tearful goodbye at Heathrow Airport. Her fingers strayed involuntarily to her stomach, wondering if her child would ever meet his Scots grandfather and when she looked up, Will’s eyes watched her with a knowing expression.

A slight smile played on his dark lips and Hana’s face impeached him, begging him not to ask. The elderly man respected her plea and didn’t refer to his opportunist’s knowledge. “You promise you’ll lock it up safe? Nobody will see it.” Hana stood up feeling strangely light headed.

“I promise,” Will assured her. “As long as youse remember one thing, little one. We all comes to a point where we crave the route home to us roots. Don’t matter how old we get, life has a beginnin’ and an end and them’s what can’t see the whole story feels permanently lost. One day, maybe long after I’m gone, you might have to hand this book over to them’s what comes lookin’ because it’s a witness statement of their life. It’s their route map home. As long as youse never lose sight of that, youse gonna know when that time is.”

Hana stumbled from the museum feeling stressed and ill. She roamed the hotel searching for her daughter and husband. Logan came to his own conclusions concerning his failed wedding to Caroline Marsh, believing the whole thing to be a sham. Hana now knew for sure that he’d been played by a ruthless Reuben Du Rose, but perhaps so had Caroline. The other woman had genuinely loved Logan in her own sick, controlling way. She possibly had no clue that Reuben would stop the marriage somehow. For whatever else Reuben was guilty of, the diaries made it clear; he would abide by his mother’s wishes, until time immemorial.

As Hana searched the family areas for her lover and child, Miriam Du Rose’s words clanged forcefully in her mind, spoken on Hana’s wedding night when they were alone together in the kitchen. “Keep him away from her. Promise me?”

Logan and Caroline. Not just lovers, but cousins.