In the Land of the Long White Cloud

eyes, he evidently could still follow Gwyneira.
    “Wha…what is there to celebrate, exactly?” he inquired drunkenly.
    Gwyneira glared daggers at him. “The birth of your ‘grandson’!” she said. “Most people would call that a happy event, if you care to recall. And all of Haldon is waiting for you to honor it appropriately.”
    “Qui…quite a party…when the mo…mother is sulking and the fa…father is off somewhere else,” Gerald scoffed.
    “You’re not exactly innocent with regard to Lucas’s and my lack of enthusiasm!” Gwyneira fired back at him. “But as you see, I’m not sulking. I’ll be there, I’ll smile—and you will read aloud a letter from Lucas who, regretfully, is still in England. Everything is burning down, Gerald! They’re walking all over us in Haldon. There are rumors that Paul…well, that he’s not a Warden.”

    The party took place three weeks later in Kiward Station’s garden. Rivers of champagne flowed once again. Gerald acted amiable and let himself be saluted. Gwyneira kept a smile glued to her face and revealed to the assembled guests that Paul was named after his great-grandfathers. She pointed out the obvious similarities to Gerald to nearly all the members of the community. Blessedly, Paul himself slumbered in the arms of his nanny. Gwyneira prudently avoided presenting him herself. He still howled when she held him, and she still reacted with anger and impatience. She understood that she had to welcome this child into the family and secure his position—but she could not feel anything deeper for the boy. Paul remained estranged from her, and what was worse—every time she looked into his eyes, she was reminded of Gerald’s lustful grimace on the fateful night ofhis conception. When the party was finally over, Gwyneira fled into the stables and cried without restraint into Igraine’s soft mane just as she had done as a child when something seemed hopeless. Gwyneira wished it had never happened. She yearned for James, even for Lucas. She still had not heard a word from her husband, and Gerald’s researches had proved fruitless. The country was simply too big. Whoever wanted to stay missing, stayed missing.

8
    “J ust hit him, Luke! Once, with something behind it, on the back of the noggin. He won’t feel a thing.” Even as Roger spoke, he did in another abandoned seal pup—in accordance with the rules of the seal hunting profession, the animal died without his pelt being harmed. The hunters killed by hitting the seal on the back of the head with a club. If blood flowed at all, it flowed out the nose of the young seal. After that they got straight to work skinning it, without even bothering to make sure the animal was dead beforehand.
    Lucas Warden raised his club, but he could not bring himself to harm the small animal looking at him with the trusting eyes of a child. The lamentations of the mother seals all around him didn’t help. The men were only there for the pups’ soft and valuable pelts. They wandered across the seal banks where the mothers raised their children, killing the pups before their mothers’ eyes. The rocks of Tauranga Bay were already red with their blood—and Lucas had to fight the urge to vomit. He could not comprehend how the men could be so heartless. The suffering of the animals did not bother them in the least; they even made jokes about how benevolently and helplessly the seals awaited their hunters. Lucas had joined the party three days before but had yet to kill an animal. At first the men appeared to hardly notice that he only helped with the skinning and storing of the pelts on the wagons and flats. But now they were insisting that he take part in the slaughter too. Lucas felt hopelessly sick. Was
this
what made a man? What was so much more honest about the work of killing helpless animals than painting and writing? Lucas, however, was tired of asking himself these questions. He was here to prove himself, determined to do exactly the work that his father had done to lay the foundations ofhis wealth. Originally Lucas had hired himself onto a whaling ship, but that had ended in ignominious failure. Lucas did not like to admit it, but he had fled—this despite the fact that he had already signed the contract and really liked the man who had hired him.

    Lucas had met Copper, a tall, dark-haired man with the angular, weathered face typical of “Coasters,” in a pub in Greymouth. Right after his flight from Kiward