Kelly was happy to have room and board with Quinn and he accepted his lot as indentured labour. His new home was a solid kauri house with matai floorboards, rimu wainscoting and a bay window at the front, mullioned in solid rimu. The front door opened onto a veranda, shaded by four peach trees that grew between the house and the road. Behind the house were stables and storerooms and a well-tended garden. It was generally a quiet household. Ᾱwhina had a bearing of quiet serenity, which was remarkable considering the turmoil the country was in and the extremity of her people. And Rāwiri was usually sullen and taciturn. Quinn, on the other hand, could be quite boisterous, especially when he was drinking.
Kelly was permitted a brief period of convalescence during which he lounged on the veranda, wrote letters to Annie, worked in the garden and walked about the town. Ᾱwhina found him in the sitting room one morning standing before the tall rimu bookcase and said she was making tea. He was reading the titles of the books: classic and popular English literature and he said, “I wouldn’t have taken Patrick for a fan of Shakespeare.”
“Oh, Patrick is not much of a reader, really,” said Ᾱwhina. “Most of the books are mine.”
Kelly coloured with embarrassment at the assumptions he’d made.
Ᾱwhina smiled and said, “I was educated at a Church Missionary School in Peria. It was there I learned to read and write in te reo Māori and English and there I discovered a love of literature. I’m reading John Milton at the moment. I enjoy his epic poems, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. They don’t accord exactly with the Bible but they are interestingly and vividly conceived. Feel free to borrow any of the books yourself,” she offered, but Kelly was not much of a reader either.
“Rāwiri’s not a great reader either,” Ᾱwhina said. “But he can read and write, in English and te reo Māori. I’ve been home schooling him.”
“How did you meet Patrick?” Kelly asked.
“It was the first time some of our iwi took produce to Auckland to sell. I went as the interpreter. We would have been cheated at the market if Patrick hadn’t intervened. He was an honest trader. He was very helpful to us and then we dealt with him each time.”
*
On his first day on the job, Kelly took the horse and dray down the rutted, muddy Queen Street to Commercial Bay, with Quinn and Rāwiri on the horse and cart. At the Queen’s Wharf they loaded some farm machinery and commissariat supplies, including some barrels bearing a WI stamp, hogsheads of West Indian rum for the British Imperial Army. They also loaded crates of clinking bottles onto the cart. Quinn had branched out into a lucrative sideline of importing and distributing non commissariat fermented and spirituous liquors: rum, brandy and whisky. There was a ready market for the imports and the Auckland Provincial Government were happy to collect the excise on alcohol, although they probably didn’t collect any tax on the moonshine packed in cream cans.
Rāwiri was conspicuous among the workers on the dock as by this time there were not many Māori in the town. A youth in a gang from the disreputable Freemans Bay called out, “This is our land now boy. Get down the line behind the line with the rest of the niggers.” Then the ruffian brazenly took a crate from the cart and started walking off with it. But he didn’t get far before he was stopped in his tracks by a gunshot into the ground in front of his feet. Everyone on the dock stopped and stared as Quinn pointed his revolver at the would-be thief and then waved it in the direction of the cart. The crate was returned to the cart without a word and everyone went back about their business.
Quinn and Kelly shipped all manner of nonmilitary supplies along the Waikato River and the Great South Road to the military settlements at Hamilton, Cambridge and Alexandra (Pirongia). Kelly became acquainted with another Auckland merchant, Ralph Simpson, as they kept his military camp canteens regularly supplied with liquor. There were lots of deliveries to grog shops and it soon became apparent that liquor was not so much a sideline as the mainstream of the business. It was certainly in more demand than farming equipment.
“It’s sad to see so much of this land covered in fern and scrub,” Kelly remarked as they trundled along the road through the Waikato. “Where are all the wheat fields and kūmara gardens? Where are all the crops? Why isn’t the land being farmed?”
“It’s the military settlers,” Quinn said. “They’re mostly men with no farming experience and no desire to be subsistence farmers. They’re given uneconomic plots, in what’s potentially still a war zone, no road access, far from markets and they’ve got no capital. They come off army rations and they’re desperate so they sell their bit of land. Some are heading off to Thames and the South Island to try their luck in the gold fields.”
Quinn flicked the reins to keep the horses from dawdling. “The rich speculators buy up lots of land cheaply: ten pounds, twenty pounds. The speculators aren’t farmers. They’re not interested in developing the land. They’re land banking. They’ll sell it off in bigger parcels when the price goes up. Wait till we get the railroad through the Waikato and all the way to Wellington. The land will be worth a fortune.”
“Why doesn’t the government buy some land back?” Kelly said. “They’re supposed be granting some land back to Māoris, at least to the ones who were loyal to the Crown.”
“The government doesn’t seem to be interested in buying land back just now,” Quinn said. “Mind you, some of the ministers are buying land privately. The likes of Russell and Whitaker are doing all right out of it.”
Before long Kelly was delivering orders on his own on the river steamers and barges. Quinn had full confidence in his young protégée, but always reminded him to never take his eyes off the cargo, especially the rum, and especially the sailors. Theft was a constant threat.
On returning from one of his trips to the Waikato, Kelly found only Ᾱwhina and Rāwiri at home. “Patrick’s in jail,” Ᾱwhina informed him. “He says you and Rāwiri carry on the business. You do the selling.”
“What’s happened?” Kelly asked.
“Rāwiri got into a fight at the dock and another youth came at him with a knife. So Patrick shot him.”
“Dead?”
“Yes.”
“Is Rāwiri all right?”
“He was battered but not stabbed. Patrick prevented that.”
“So what’ll happen now?”
“There will be a trial. He will probably get off. He has a good lawyer.”
*
Christmas was approaching and it was a busy time for the business. Kelly was often on the road and on the river, and Ᾱwhina received visitors from her whānau while he came and went. He returned home one day to find Ᾱwhina in the company of a younger version of herself. Her sister, Pania, had virtually the same features: the same dark eyes with the slight Oriental slant, the straight, snub nose and plumpish upper lip. Even her voice was similar, though she didn’t have the same easy command of English.
Kelly thought that Ᾱwhina would want to mark the Christian festival with a celebration at home, even with Quinn absent. But instead she said, “I must go back to Peria for a tangihanga, the funeral of Tarapīpipi Te Waharoa, the great rangatira of my iwi, Ngāti Hauā. You may know of him as Wiremu Tāmihana.”
“Yes, they call him the Kingmaker”, said Kelly.” I didn’t know he had died.”
“He hasn’t died yet,” said Ᾱwhina. “He will die in three days.”
“How do you know when he will die?”
“He has said so himself.”
“Is he also a prophet then?”
“Yes, and a great man of God and a man of peace. When he became a Christian, he was baptised and given the name William Thompson. Hence the name Wiremu Tāmihana. He was my teacher for a time at the mission school. He established a Christian community at Peria, named after the biblical Berea, with a mission statement of ‘King and Queen together with God over both.’ Life there was based on the Ten Commandments.”
“Why is he called the Kingmaker?” Kelly asked.
“It was his influence that brought the leaders of the many iwi together to agree on who would be our king. At his coronation Wiremu anointed Pōtatau Te Wherowhero as King by placing a Bible above his head.”
A man arrived at the house and tethered his horse at the gate, a Māori warrior Kelly judged by his tattooed face, blue-green whorls on both cheeks and either side of his nose and stripes ascending to his hairline.
The intruder entered through the gate and fixed Kelly with a hostile glare. He appeared to be unarmed and Kelly stood on the veranda to face him down. There was a brief standoff until Ᾱwhina came out and said, “It’s my brother, Hamana, come to fetch Rāwiri, Pania and me to Peria.”
She greeted her brother warmly and they spoke together in Māori. Ᾱwhina, Rāwiri and Pania had already prepared for the journey and it was a brief stay while Hamana had a light meal of bread and slices of mutton. He didn’t speak to Kelly during his brief stay, so Kelly supposed that he did not speak English. The four departed on horseback for Peria, leaving Kelly to look after the home and the business.