In the Land of the Long White Cloud

plush salon lined with several numbered doors.
    Daphne nodded. “That’s why Madame Jolanda screamed bloody murder when I had David brought up here. But where could he have gone, badly hurt as he was? We haven’t got a doctor. The barber put his leg in a splint, but feverish and half dead from hunger as he was, he couldn’t just be laid out in a stall. So I made my room available. I now take customers together with Mirabelle, and the old woman takes half my pay as rent. That said, the fellows are happy to pay for the double, so I’m not making any less. Oh well, the old lady is greedy as the Gates of Hell, but I’m ditching this place soon anyway. When Davey’s healthy, I’m going to take my children and look for something new.”
    So she already had children. George sighed. The girl must have a hard life. But then George concentrated his full attention on the room that Daphne was now entering and the young man lying in the bed.
    David was hardly more than a boy. He looked tiny in the plush double bed, and his splinted and heavily bandaged leg, held up by a complicated contraption of supports and ropes, exaggerated this impression. The boy lay with his eyes closed. His handsome face was pale and drawn beneath his scraggly blond hair.
    “Davey?” Daphne asked cheerfully. “Here’s a visitor for you. A gentleman from…”
    “Christchurch,” George finished her statement.
    “Apparently, he knew Luke. Davey, what was Luke’s last name? You know it, right?”
    For George, who had been casting an eye about the room, the question was as good as answered already. On the boy’s night table lay a sketchbook with drawings that were perfectly in keeping with Lucas’s style.
    “Denward,” the boy said.

    An hour later George had heard the whole story. David told him how Lucas had spent the last few months as a construction worker and draftsman, and ended by describing their ill-fated search for gold.
    “It’s all my fault!” he said desperately. “Luke didn’t want to go at all…and then I just had to try climbing down this rock. I killed him! I’m a murderer!”
    George shook his head. “You made a mistake, son, maybe more than one. But if it happened like you told me, it was an accident. If Lucas had tied the rope better, he would still be alive. You can’t blame yourself forever. That doesn’t do anyone any good.”
    Inwardly he thought that this accident seemed just like Lucas. He was an artist, hopelessly inept in practical life. But such a talent, such a waste.
    “How were you saved in the end?” George asked. “I mean, if I understood correctly, you two were pretty far from here.”
    “We…we weren’t all that far,” David said. “We both miscalculated. I thought we had ridden at least forty miles, but it was no more than fifteen. I couldn’t manage that on foot…with my injured leg. I was sure I was going to die. But first…first I buried Luke. Right there on the beach. Not very deep, I’m afraid, but…but there aren’t any wolves here, right?”
    George assured him that no wild animal on New Zealand would exhume the body.
    “And then I waited…waited to die myself. Three days, I think…at some point I lost consciousness; then I had a fever. I couldn’t makeit to the river anymore to drink water…but during that time our horse had come home, which made Mr. Miller think that something wasn’t right. He wanted to send a search party right away, but the men laughed at him. Luke…Luke was not that skilled with horses, you know. Everyone thought he had just tied the gelding up wrong, and that it had run off. But then when we didn’t come back, they sent a boat up. The barber came along, and they found me right away. After only paddling two hours, they said. I was completely unconscious. When I came to, I was here.”
    George nodded and ran his hand over the boy’s hair. David looked so young. George could not help but think about the child that Elizabeth was carrying inside her at that moment. Maybe in a few years he would have a son like this—so eager, so brave—but hopefully born under a luckier star than this young man here. What might Lucas have seen in David? The son he had wished for? Or the lover? George was no fool, and he came from a big city. Homosexual tendencies were nothing new to him, and Lucas’s bearing—along with Gwyneira’s years of childlessness—had given him reason to suspect early on that the younger Warden leaned more toward boys than girls.