The Colour by Rose Tremain Read Free Book Online Page A

embellish the large rooms. A servant whose name was Jane, but whom the Orchards idiosyncratically addressed as Janet – perhaps to make her particular to them? – kept things polished and neat. At Christmas time, Dorothy Orchard decorated the walls with ferns and made honey-coloured candles from beeswax, while Toby ordered geese to be killed and plucked.
    â€˜Our world,’ Dorothy would whisper as, one by one, she lit the Christmas candles. ‘Our world, our world, our new world.’
    They were not alone in it. They had a son called Edwin, whom they had almost lost to a different world.
    In the summer of 1856, Edwin Orchard had been lying in his rushwork cradle on the verandah of Orchard House. A hot, dry wind was blowing, bending the newly planted saplings, tugging at the sheets on the washing line and sending sudden swirls of dust into the air. Baby Edwin’s Maori nurse, Pare, was watching over the cradle, but, little by little, her attention wandered from it and went towards the dust and the suffering trees. It seemed to Pare that the invisible god of the forest was close by and she was unable to stop herself from shivering. She felt light-headed, confused, as though the wind had entered her skull. She blinked and rubbed her eyes. The sun glinted on a nail at the verandah’s edge and Pare was staring at this shining nail when she saw, at the edge of her vision, a green creature come scuttling towards her.
    Pare screamed. She stood up, and, as though flayed by the wind, she went flying into the house, with Edwin in his cradle quite forgotten. She shut herself in the kitchen, stuffing towels into the crack between the door and the floor. Her mind filled with visions of the ng ā rara, the giant hot-tongued reptile which the Maoris told stories about and which had often crept into her dreams. She imagined this creature following her into the house and pinioning her beneath him and she knew that to be raped by the ng ā rara was the most terrible fate a woman could suffer.
    Pare put her face in her hands. She could still hear the violence of the wind. It rattled the kitchen shutters and howled in the rafters overhead. And she thought now that this what the wind had heralded – the coming of the ng ā rara to the Orchard Run. She could not go back on to the verandah. She would have called for Toby Orchard to come and kill the ng ā rara with one of his shotguns, but she knew that he was out on the flats, miles away. Nor were Dorothy and Janet in the house, but out in Dorothy’s carriage, taking oatcakes and tomato chutney to the vicar at Rangiora. Pare didn’t know what she could do except to stay locked in the kitchen until somebody came home and saved her.
    Meanwhile, the wind altered its direction just enough to begin to rock baby Edwin’s cradle. Edwin Orchard always swore that he could remember this, the sudden marvellous see-sawing of the rush cradle in the southerly wind. And then, like a ng ā rara picking up a human girl, the wind scooped him up – baby and cradle and little embroidered coverlet – and hurled him off the verandah and turned him upside-down on to the parched front lawn.
    He could never remember this momentary flight of his, nor his landing, nor the time that followed. He lay without moving for almost an hour, until Dorothy and Janet found him, with his little head lying in the dust. Dorothy wrapped him in her skirts and carried him inside the house, where Pare was locked in the kitchen. Dorothy could feel Edwin’s heart still beating, but he wouldn’t move nor open his eyes.
    She laid him in her bed. Janet was sent back to Rangiora to fetch Dr Pettifer. He told Dorothy that none of Edwin’s limbs was broken but that he couldn’t say whether the baby would live or die. ‘He is elsewhere,’ was all he could pronounce, ‘he has gone away from the here-and-now and may never return.’
    That evening, Toby Orchard