Song of the Spirits (In the Land of the Long White Cloud saga) Read online

  ALSO BY SARAH LARK

  In the Land of the Long White Cloud

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2008 by Verlagsgruppe Lübbe GmbH & Co. KG, Bergisch Gladbach

  English translation copyright © 2013 by D. W. Lovett

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Song of the Spirits was first published in 2008 by Verlagsgruppe Lübbe GmbH & Co. KG as Das Lied der Maori. Translated from German by Dustin W. Lovett. Published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2013.

  Published by AmazonCrossing

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781477807675

  ISBN-10: 1477807675

  LCCN: 2013905869

  Contents

  New Zealand

  The Heiress

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  For the Sake of Man

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  Flight

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  Healing

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  Voices of the Spirits

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  About the Translator

  The Heiress

  QUEENSTOWN AND CANTERBURY PLAINS

  1893

  1

  Are you Mrs. O’Keefe?”

  Puzzled, William Martyn looked at the petite redhead who greeted him at the reception desk. The men in the gold-mining camps had described Helen O’Keefe to him as an older woman, or rather as a sort of dragoness who spits more fire as she ages. Strict propriety was said to reign in Mrs. O’Keefe’s hotel. Smoking was forbidden, as was alcohol, not to mention guests of the opposite sex without a marriage certificate. The gold miners’ stories had him expecting a prison rather than an inn. However, in Mrs. O’Keefe’s establishment, he knew he could expect a bathhouse rather than fleas and bedbugs.

  It was this last point that had convinced William to ignore all of his new friends’ warnings. After three days on an old sheep farm that the gold miners used for shelter, he was prepared to do anything to escape the vermin. He was even willing to put up with this “dragon,” Helen O’Keefe.

  But it was no dragon that greeted him—rather, this exceptionally lovely green-eyed creature, whose face was framed by an indomitable mass of red-gold curls. Without a doubt the most gratifying sight since William had left his ship in Dunedin, New Zealand. His spirits, having reached new lows over the past few weeks, rose markedly.

  The girl laughed.

  “No, I’m Elaine O’Keefe. Helen is my grandmother.”

  William smiled. He knew his smile made a good impression, as an attentive look had always crept onto the faces of the girls in Ireland when they had seen the sparkle in his eye.

  “That almost makes me sorry. Here I’d thought I had an idea for a new business: ‘Water from Queenstown—discover the Fountain of Youth!’”

  Elaine giggled. She had a narrow face and a small, maybe slightly too pointy nose dotted with countless freckles.

  “You should meet my father. He’s always making up slogans like that: ‘Life’s good as long as your shovel’s good! Get your mining gear at the O’Kay Warehouse!’”

  “I’ll take that to heart,” William promised and did actually take note of the name. “So how about it? Can I get a room?”

  The girl hesitated. “Are you a gold miner? Then… well, there are rooms available, but they’re rather expensive. Most of the miners can’t afford the lodging here…”

  “Do I look so hard up?” William asked with feigned sternness, wrinkling the brow beneath his ample head of hair.

  Elaine looked him over shamelessly. At first glance, there was little to differentiate him from the countless other gold miners she saw every day. He had a somewhat dirty and tattered appearance and wore a waxed jacket, blue jeans, and sturdy boots. Upon closer inspection, however, Elaine—the daughter of a merchant—recognized the quality of his accessories: an expensive leather jacket was visible beneath his open coat; he wore leather chaps; his boots looked as though they’d been made of costly material; and the hatband on his broad-brimmed Stetson had been woven from horsehair. That alone would have cost a small fortune. Even his saddlebags—which he had initially slung casually over his right shoulder but had since deposited on the floor between his legs—appeared expensive and well made.

  None of which was typical of the adventurers who came to Queenstown to search for gold in the rivers and hills—since hardly a soul ever became rich from his efforts. Sooner or later, the vast majority left town as poor and ragged as when they’d arrived. This was largely because the men, as a rule, squandered their gains in Queenstown right away instead of saving them. Only the immigrants who had settled there and founded a business of some kind had ever made any money—businesses including Elaine’s parents’ warehouse, her grandmother’s inn, Stuart Peters’s smithy and stables, Ethan’s post and telegraph office, and, first and foremost, the ill-reputed but generally beloved pub on Main Street that housed Daphne’s Hotel, the brothel, upstairs.

  William repaid Elaine’s probing gaze with a patient if somewhat mocking smile. Elaine noted that dimples appeared in his youthful cheeks when he smirked. And he was clean-shaven. That was unusual too. Most of the gold miners only reached for their razors when there was dancing at Daphne’s on the weekends, if even then.

  Elaine decided to tease the newcomer a bit in an effort to draw him out of his shell. “You don’t smell as strongly as the others at least.”

  William smiled. “Up to now the sea’s been offering an opportunity to bathe for free. But not for much longer, I’ve been told, and it’s getting cold. Though I understand gold seems to like body odor. He who bathes the least takes the most nuggets from the river.”

  Elaine had to laugh. “You shouldn’t take your cues from that or there will be trouble with my grandmother. Here, now if you’d fill this out.” She handed him a check-in form, attempting not to peek too curiously across the counter. As furtively as possible, she read along as he energetically filled in the blanks. That, too, was unusual; few gold miners could write so fluently.

  William Martyn… Elaine’s heart beat louder as she read his name. A nice name.

  “What should I fill in here?” William asked, indicating the blank asking for his home address. “I’ve just arrived. This will be my first address in New Zealand.”

  Elaine could no longer contain her interest. “Really? So where are
you from? No, let me guess. My grandmother always does that with new customers. You can tell by the accent where a person is from.”

  With most of the settlers, it was simple. Of course, she occasionally got it wrong. The Swedes, the Dutch, and the Germans, for instance, all sounded the same to Elaine. But she could usually tell the Irish and Scots apart without difficulty, and Londoners were especially easy to recognize. Experts could even identify the neighborhood where a person had been raised. William, however, was hard to place. He sounded English, but he spoke more softly, drawing the vowels out a bit more than the English typically did.

  Elaine ventured a guess. “You’re from Wales.” Her grandmother on her mother’s side, Gwyneira McKenzie (formerly Warden), was Welsh, and though Gwyneira did not speak any distinct dialect, William’s inflection reminded Elaine a little of her. She was the daughter of a landed noble, and her tutors had always made a point of teaching her accent-free English.

  William shook his head but didn’t smile as Elaine had hoped he would. “Where did you get that idea?” he asked. “I’m Irish, from Connemara.”

  Elaine’s cheeks flushed. Though there were many Irish working the mines, she never would have guessed he was one of them. Most of those men spoke in a rather heavy dialect. William, however, expressed himself more elegantly.

  As if to emphasize his heritage, he now filled in his most recent address in large letters in the blank space: Martyn Manor, Connemara.

  That did not sound like a family farm; that sounded more like a lord’s estate.

  “I’ll show you your room now,” Elaine said. She was not really supposed to accompany the guests upstairs herself, especially not the men. Her grandmother Helen had drilled into her to always call the superintendent or one of the twins for this task. But Elaine was delighted to make an exception for this man. She stepped out from behind the reception desk, holding herself erect and ladylike, as her grandmother had taught her to do: head raised with a natural grace, shoulders back. And absolutely no lapsing into that alluring, swaying step that Daphne’s girls liked to put on for show.

  Elaine hoped that her barely half-formed bust and her very thin, newly corseted waist would count for something. She hated wearing a corset. But if she caught this man’s eye because of it…

  William followed her, happy that she could not see him as he did so. Indeed, he could hardly restrain himself from staring pruriently at her figure, petite but already gently rounded in all the right places. All told—including the time in prison, then the eight weeks to get here, followed by the ride from Dunedin to Queenstown’s gold fields—it had been about four months since he had even come close to a woman.

  An unimaginable length of time, really. It was high time he set things right. The boys in the gold mines had gone on and on about Daphne’s girls, of course; they were supposed to be rather pretty and the rooms clean. But the thought of courting this sweet little redhead pleased William considerably more than the prospect of seeking instant gratification in a prostitute’s arms.

  Even the room Elaine now opened for him delighted him. It was tidy and furnished simply but lovingly with furniture made of light-colored wood. There were pictures on the wall, and a pitcher with water for washing up stood ready.

  “You can use the bathhouse as well,” Elaine explained, reddening a bit. “But you have to sign up ahead of time. Ask my grandmother. Or Mary or Laurie.”

  With those words, she was about to turn away, but William held her back gently.

  “And you? I can’t ask you?” he inquired softly, looking at her attentively.

  Elaine smiled, flattered. “No, I’m not usually here. I’m only standing in for Grandmum today. But I… well, normally I help out at the O’Kay Warehouse. It’s my father’s business.”

  William nodded. So she was not just pretty then but also from a good family. He liked the girl more and more. And he needed several items for gold mining anyway.

  “I’ll stop by sometime soon,” William said.

  Elaine positively floated down the stairs. She felt as though her heart had turned into a hot air balloon that was lifting her in a lively updraft above earthly concerns. Her feet hardly touched the ground, and her hair seemed to blow in the wind, though naturally no breeze stirred inside the house. Elaine was beaming; she had the sensation that she was standing at the beginning of an adventure, as beautiful and invincible as the heroines in the novels she secretly read in Ethan’s general store.

  With that same expression still on her face, she did a little dance in the garden of the large town house that contained Helen O’Keefe’s hotel. Elaine knew it well; she had been born in this house. Her parents had built it for their growing family when their business first began turning a profit. However, it had eventually become too loud and busy for them in the middle of Queenstown. Elaine’s mother, Fleurette, hailed from one of the great sheep farms in the Canterbury Plains, and she in particular missed the open country. Elaine’s parents had therefore resettled on a bucolic piece of land on the river, which was missing only one thing: gold deposits. Elaine’s father, Ruben O’Keefe, had originally marked it off as a claim, but despite his many talents, he had been a hopeless case when it came to discovering gold. Fortunately, Fleurette had quickly realized that, and had invested her dowry in merchandise delivery—primarily shovels and gold pans, which the miners practically snatched out of their hands—rather than in the futile “gold mine” enterprise. The O’Kay Warehouse had grown out of those early sales.

  Fleurette had called the new house on the river “Gold Nugget Manor” as a joke, but the name had eventually taken root. Elaine and her brothers had grown up happily there among the horses and pigs, even a few sheep, just like where Fleurette had been raised. Ruben complained when he had to shear the sheep every year, and his sons, Stephen and George, likewise cared little for farmwork—in stark contrast to Elaine. The little country house she’d grown up in was nothing like Kiward Station, the large sheep farm her grandmother Gwyneira managed in the Canterbury Plains. She would have loved to live and work there and was a little envious of her cousin, who was set to inherit the farm one day.

  Elaine, however, was not one to brood for any length of time. She found it almost as interesting to help out in the store and manage things in the hotel for her grandmother. She had little desire to go to college like her older brother, Stephen. He was studying law in Dunedin, thus fulfilling his father’s dream, as he too had once wanted to be a lawyer. Ruben O’Keefe had been a justice of the peace in Queenstown for almost twenty years, and there was nothing he liked better than chatting about legal matters with Stephen. Though Elaine’s younger brother, George, was still in school, it looked like he would be the businessman of the family someday. He was already zealous about helping out in the shop and had thousands of ideas for improvements.

  Helen O’Keefe—still unaware of her granddaughter’s high spirits and their origins in the form of newcomer William Martyn—was gracefully pouring tea into the cup of her guest, Daphne O’Rourke.

  This tea party in public view gave both ladies a certain mischievous delight. They knew that half of Queenstown whispered about the friendship between the two “hotel owners.” Helen, however, felt no compunction about it. Some forty years earlier, a thirteen-year-old Daphne had been sent to New Zealand under her tutelage. An orphanage in London had wanted to get rid of a few of its charges, and people were looking for maids in New Zealand. Helen had been about to leave England for an uncertain future with a fiancé she had never met, and the Church of England had paid for her crossing as the girls’ chaperone.

  Helen, who had served as a governess in London until then, made use of the three-month journey to polish the girls’ social skills, skills that Daphne still employed to this day. Her position as a housemaid, however, had been a fiasco—as had Helen’s marriage. Though both women had found themselves in insufferable conditions, they had each made the best of it.

  They looked up when they heard Elaine’s footsteps
on the rear terrace. Helen raised her narrow, deeply wrinkled face, whose pointed nose betrayed her kinship with Elaine. Her hair, once dark brown with a chestnut-colored shine, was now streaked with gray but remained long and healthy. Helen wore it in a bun at the nape of her neck most of the time. Her gray eyes glowed with life experience and curiosity—especially just then, as she’d noticed the radiant expression on Elaine’s face.

  “Well now, child! You look like you just got a Christmas present. Do you have some news?”

  Daphne, whose feline features looked a little hard even when she smiled, appraised Elaine’s expression a little less innocently. She had read it in the faces of dozens of easy women who thought they had found Prince Charming among their customers. And every time, Daphne spent long hours comforting the girl when her dreamy prince ultimately proved himself a frog, or worse, some disgusting toad. Daphne’s face therefore reflected a certain wariness as Elaine approached them cheerfully.

  “We have a new guest,” she exclaimed enthusiastically. “A gold miner from Ireland.”

  Helen frowned. Daphne laughed, and her glowing green eyes flashed derisively.

  “Are you sure he wasn’t lost, Lainie? Irish gold miners usually end up with my girls.”

  Elaine shook her head emphatically. “He is not one of those… Forgive me, Miss O’Rourke, I mean…” she spluttered. “He’s a gentleman… I think.”

  The wrinkles in Helen’s brow deepened. She had some experience with “gentlemen.”

  Daphne laughed. “Dearie, there’s no such thing as an Irish gentleman. Anyone who is considered a noble over there is originally from England, since the island has been an English possession for ages—a fact that still has the Irish howling like wolves after a few pints. Most of the Irish clan leaders were deposed and run out by English nobility. And they haven’t done anything since but get rich off the backs of the Irish. Now they’re letting their tenants starve by the thousands. Some gentlemen! But your miner could hardly be among them. They cling to their dirt.”

  “How do you know so much about Ireland?” Elaine asked, intrigued. The brothel’s proprietress fascinated her, but she rarely had the opportunity to speak at length with her.