The Du Rose Prophecy

Chapter Three-2

“Yes thanks, Toby,” Hana replied, smiling at Logan’s head stockman. “Please can you help me tack Sacha up? I can’t lift the saddle; it’s too heavy.”

Toby was conflicted but only for a second. “You rode her before, aye?”

Hana nodded. “Yes, she’s fine with me.”

Toby nodded once and then shrugged. He looked across at the statue of a stable hand, hopping from foot to foot like an i***t. He beckoned him over, his voice sharp. “Rawhiti will help, if that’s ok? I’m taking the quad up to the forty-first to move some stock and I should get going.”

On cue, his radio chirped and an impatient voice crackled through like a disjointed universe calling. A string of swear words followed as somebody somewhere reached the end of their patience. Toby looked apologetically at Hana and beckoned the young man again. “Geez man, you made of salt or what?” he asked angrily, “Help the missus will you?”

He looked back as he strode over to the huge equipment shed, pleased to see the man finally come to life. Toby paused to watch Rawhiti bring the saddle and bridle across the yard, gingerly avoiding the mare’s back legs. The stockman fired up the bike with a roar and shot out of the shed, making them all jump.

“How do I say your name?” Hana asked kindly as the man put the saddle pad onto the shiny white body with care. “Rawhiti, Miss,” he answered politely, pronouncing the ‘wh’ at the centre of his name as an ‘f’. Hana repeated it a few times until she got it right and the man nodded, pleased at the trouble she took. “Most Pākehā. just call me bro,” he said sadly. He fitted the saddle onto the ridged spine and jumped once when the horse turned to look at him. He hissed with exasperation. “I’ve worked with horses since I could walk and this mare is one b...” he bit back the swear word, remembering who he was talking to. “Are you Logan Du Rose’s wife? The boss man?”

Hana smiled serenely. “Yes, I am. And Sacha’s playing with you,” she said, stroking the long shaggy forelock out of the mare’s eyes.

Rawhiti raised his eyebrows as he tightened up the girth, watching the back leg come slightly off the floor in warning and readying himself to dodge it. He got the bridle on without incident but could swear the mare narrowed her eyes at him as she took the metal bit behind her front teeth. “Evil, just evil,” he muttered. “Want help up?” He offered Hana his cupped hands for a leg up, but she shook her head and led the mare over to the mounting block.

The horse stood meek as a lamb while the woman settled herself in the saddle. But Rawhiti caught a flash of pain in her pale face as she swung her leg across the broad back and clambered on. “You sure you’re all right, Miss?” he asked. Something hammered in his brain about the missus having not been well, but he couldn’t recall what important detail clamoured to make itself known. As Hana clattered sedately out of the yard, he went back to his sweeping, hoping he hadn’t made a bad first impression.

“Which way, Sach?” Hana asked the horse quietly as they left the pristine stable yard. “I don’t think I’m in any fit state to open gates today.” The mare snorted and turned left, making for the steep track put in for the construction vehicles in the house building process. It would later become the five kilometre driveway. At the moment, it was hard-core packed down with bright orange sand and safe for the shod feet to walk on, provided they stayed in the middle. “I hope we don’t meet any big lorries,” Hana said, observing the dense bush on one side and the perilous drop on the other. “There’s nowhere to wait.”

Hana relaxed into the saddle and enjoyed the freedom of being alone. It had become a rarity in the last week for the woman to be left by herself. In the hospital, nurses and doctors checked her constantly, waking her to do their various tests. Once at the hotel it was Logan or Leslie, Mark, Tama or her father who peered over her anxiously. She was tired of waking up with a start to find a worried face above her line of vision, checking her for signs of life.

The wind gusted and threatened to steal Miriam’s hat off her head. Hana took it off and reached inside, finding the elasticated cord and pulling it down over her chin. It was too precious to lose. Irreplaceable. As the driveway progressed underneath the canopy of the bush, it grew more shaded from the elements and the rule of nature took over. It didn’t seem to matter what man did; the bush would retain its fierce hold on life as long as it was able, defying the odds and springing back up even after a bush fire.

They walked along making decent progress on the incline, Sacha walking with lengthened reins and her head down, seeming to examine the ground underfoot with interest. Hana let her pick her own footing and sat heavily, allowing herself to breathe deeply and consider the events of the past week with objectivity.

She had felt the cold fingers of death exactly a week ago, knotting eagerly around her heart. The pain was far more frightening than dying itself, something Hana had never considered. It made her think of her late husband, Vikram Johal. He died in a horrific car accident on the Kaimai Ranges, ploughed into head-on by a speeding articulated lorry which ran out of control on a bad downhill bend. Vik, coming up the mountain, didn’t stand a chance and the coroner said he died on impact. Hana hoped so. Her heart attack was so unbearable, she didn’t want to think of Vik’s premature death being one of hopelessness and agony.

“Perhaps my experience would have more purpose,” she told the plodding mare, “if I could stand up in church and claim an out-of-body moment or a meeting with Jesus.” But she couldn’t. It had been as terrifying as it was pointless. Hana felt as though she learned nothing, except perhaps not to trust her body. Neither she nor her poor husband needed showing how fragile life was. Surely they had lost more than enough between them already.

Hana felt the tightness of the stitches in her chest and shoulder as Sacha negotiated a piece of disturbed ground and she reached up gingerly to touch the outside of her shirt. Her fingers strayed inside, to touch the object underneath her left collar bone. It wasn’t huge, hardly noticeable. They said that she would get used to it. It felt odd. Hana sighed heavily and Sacha lifted her head and flicked her ears back and forth. The woman leaned forward and patted the velvety neck with gratitude. “You’re uncannily perceptive. Perhaps that’s why my husband keeps you.”

The gate to the top site was wide open; so different to the coveted, protected piece of land Logan first introduced Hana to. She was his girlfriend then, tentatively taking her first steps into a new relationship and terrified of being hurt. She hadn’t known he was obsessed by her and had been for almost three decades. Right from the age of fourteen when he first saw her on a London tube train, pregnant, unmarried and tearful, Logan Du Rose made it his life’s work to find and possess the affections of the stunning redhead.

Hana doubted if Logan would ever have taken ‘no’ for an answer. He hadn’t needed to. She fell in love with him almost straight away after a chance at the school she worked at. Then circumstance forced them together, far quicker than if they were left to their own devices.

Sacha nosed her way through the gate and stood patiently waiting for instructions. Hana neglected to bring the halter or lead rope and now she was here, didn’t fancy the jolt which a dismount would cause her sore scars. “I don’t know how to do this, Sach,” she said, looking around her with a returning sense of hopelessness.

The mare, sensing her anticipated discomfort, wandered slowly over to a picnic table the builders used for their lunch breaks and lined herself carefully up next to it. Hana was grateful for her equine thoughtfulness and dismounted onto the table top, leaning on Sacha’s neck to get herself down without overbalancing it. “You’re pretty amazing, do you know that?” Hana kissed the side of the furry face.

Logan usually untacked the animals and put halters on them now the paddock was a building site, tying them up to the nearest fence. Hana doubted if she would be able to lift the saddle back and if she didn’t, the mare might roll and hurt herself or damage the saddle. It seemed as though having made the journey up here, Hana would be unable to look around the house. “I don’t know what to do now,” she said to the horse, sounding pitiful and Sacha snuffed gently into her hand. Hana lay her cheek against the soft furry forehead and closed her eyes, wondering what to do. Finally, she unclipped the reins from the bridle and loosened the girth a little. “Please don’t roll on Logan’s saddle because after he’s killed me, he’ll be coming for you. You can eat the grass and I’ll wash your bit when we get back.”

The horse snorted grass seed and proceeded to graze, lifting her head once as Hana added, “Oh and please could you come when I call you? I don’t think I can chase you home anymore. I’ve got enough problems.”

Sacha appeared to nod in her direction and carried on grazing, despite the metal snaffle in her mouth.

Hana wandered around the site looking at the familiar landmarks now incorporated into her new home. At the end of the driveway before it plunged steeply down the mountain, stood the old kauri tree. It stood there forever. Hana lifted her arms and tried to reach fully around its huge girth, finding she didn’t even get half-way around its smooth, knotless bark. With her cheek pressed against the cool wood, she fancied she heard its steady heartbeat drawn from the gentle motion of the earth turning on its axis. Looking up she read the names of Logan’s family. The beautiful script began with the Frenchman, Du Rose, who settled on the land in the 1800’s. It stretched through the family, a rich tapestry of names interlocked in swirling graphics and ended with her own baby’s name, Phoenix.

Hana wondered how Logan got up there to do that last carving, figuring he must have climbed the tree. He would tell her off for hugging the sacred object. It had great mana in his family, his own and his daughter’s afterbirth buried at the bottom in the dusty earth. She should wash her hands to get rid of the tapu, but rebelled and didn’t even bother looking for water. “What else can go wrong?” she mocked Logan’s ancestors. “Kill me? Too late!”

Hana raked the ground with her eyes and a sense of growing distaste. She thought of the night of Phoenix’s birth and the sound of Logan burying the placenta in the hard ground with the heel of his boot, the mountain noises and the cackle of the tui who fluttered in the trees, watching instead of settling in his nest for the night.

Hana skirted the outside of the house. The almost-finished-brickwork looked beautiful, exactly the kind of thing Logan would build, classical and visually pleasing. He had fostered the design in his mind’s eye since the age of five, when his grandmother bequeathed him the land in her will. Along with the gift came the cryptic message to ‘build a new house’. The matriarch meant a new legacy, an untainted household, not a building. Logan was trying to do both and this structure was the physical representation of that.

Hana thought about the original Phoenix Du Rose, Logan’s paternal grandmother. She was well aware of Logan’s heritage, sired by one of her sons yet raised by the other. The forty year old feud, which split the family down its core and banished one branch to a small section of the property nearby, had been down to Logan’s birth. It was the best kept family secret of all time and Logan’s devastation at his revealed heritage was catastrophic, just a few months earlier.

Hana mooched around, looking through windows as the builder’s debris made it impossible for her to enter the house. She pulled up short on the far west corner as she came face to face with the electricity generator powering the work and eventually, the house. Clapping her hand over the pacemaker, Hana backed away, her eyes wide with fear. It was one of the details she remembered from the consultant’s visit on the last day in hospital. “Stay away from magnets and generators.”

“How far do I have to be?” Hana cried out into the empty landscape. The futility of it all hit her in a tsunami-like wave of despair. “Logan’s building me a house I can never live in!” Hana backed away from the machine and the structure housing it, not looking where she was going and finding herself flat up against the wooden balustrade of the porch. Her feet grappled in sand and debris and she stumbled forwards, falling onto her hands and knees with the leather reins still clutched in her fingers. The pain was excruciating, not in her chest but on her knees as they took the brunt of her fall. She felt grit and sharp stones through the cloth of her jeans and the heels of both hands were grazed and dirty when she turned them over.

Like the motherless child she was, Hana cried without control, feeling her life unravel in front of her and powerless to stop its collapse. She forced herself off the dirty floor and staggered around the building to open ground, picking her way over discarded polystyrene and bricks, metal piping and used cardboard. Logan’s neat-freak tendency would send him crazy and the builders would be thrown off the job if he saw it. Hana stumbled like a drunkard to safety, hopelessness shrouding her like a sorry veil.

The cliff edge at the back of the house was steep and treacherous, masking a drop of hundreds of metres and Hana sank down on the precipice, her feet dangling dangerously over the lip. Logan promised the house was built into the rock, drilled down securely so it would be safe from heave and slip, certified by countless engineers. Suddenly she didn’t care anymore. Her chest hurt, her head ached and she felt tiredness wash over her like a blanket descending over her head.

Hana lay on her right side facing the distant Port Waikato. Her husband drove her to the tiny town once as curiosity got the better of her. “It seems silly,” she had argued on the drive there, “to live on a mountain looking down on a town you’ve never visited.”

There was nothing there. Port Waikato was a shop, a few houses and a café that was closed. Logan tried to warn her, but Hana was convinced he was wrong, making him drive up and down countless dead ends and roads to nowhere. The Mighty Waikato River terminated there, joining the Tasman Sea in a beautiful estuary which went largely ignored. Logan found a deserted area with sand dunes and made love to her, the bump from her pregnancy getting in the way and reducing Hana to giggles. They got sand in their underwear and Hana remembered how beautiful her husband looked, the breeze tousling his dark hair and the s*x appeal present even in the way he bit his lip. She sighed and squeezed her eyes shut against the difference in her life after the heart attack, wishing he would ravish her that reckless way again instead of fearing she might break in his fingers.

In England, a port would be marketed as a tourist destination, visited by coach loads of holiday makers with cameras and picnics. In New Zealand, nature went about its business unhindered, the biggest, longest and most treacherous river in the North Island sacrificing itself into the sea unnoticed. Hana felt the soft green grass underneath her ragged hands. It tickled and stung at the same time.

Sacha stayed nearby, snuffing and munching, seeking out the sweetest shoots with her surprisingly adept lips, wrapping them around the blades and tugging them free. The presence of the mare was comforting and Hana sniffed and wiped at her eyes and nose. She streaked her face with dirt and blood from her hands and caught her cheek with the leather reins, still clutched in her fingers. Sleep and exhaustion took her from there, casting her off into a cloudy peace, the warmth of the winter sun beating down on her shoulder. At some point, the elastic under her chin became restrictive, pushed away by her sleepy hands. When she awoke, the hat had tumbled off and lay on the ground near her face. Reaching forward to touch its leather brim, Hana saw the familiar tan cowboy boots of her husband and knew from his stance; she was in big trouble.