Read Song of the Spirits Online
Authors: Sarah Lark
Tags: #Fiction, #Sagas, #Historical, #Romance, #General
Song of the Spirits
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
Q
UEENSTOWN AND
C
ANTERBURY
P
LAINS
1893
A
re 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.