Twenty-Three: Albert, Victoria, Murder, and the Cracked Mirror

Armisted Maupin lives near here

Mar 16, 2024

Yes, when you see the Banks Peninsula the first time, the last thing you will think about is a murder in these idyllic parts.

We got back into the car and headed down and down to the water’s edge, past French Farm Winery and around and along the eastern inside rim of the volcano, running along the water’s edge, to the little settlement of Akaroa.

It was founded by a band of French pioneers in 1840. Akaroa, “Long Harbor” in the local Maori dialect.

Remember that New Zealand was founded in 1840 with the Treaty of Waitangi. In these sleepy little islands of New Zealand, the British hurried as fast as possible and only just barely beat the French, yet again, in claiming new and largely empty lands as part of their far-flung British Empire.

Today, Akaroa’s population of about six hundred residents can swell to six thousand or more in the summer months. Because it is another of New Zealand’s many Paradises. When we arrived, it was the Southern Hemisphere summer and it was hard to believe that this was the busiest the town ever got.

It was quiet and peaceful with groups of vacation folk, mostly Kiwis, strolling slowly along the waterfront and visiting the little cafés and restaurants and quaint shops. But the town seemed anything but busy.

We imagined how quiet it was most of the year when the six thousand people dwindled to its year-round population of only six hundred.

After a beautiful, gourmet lunch at C’est La Vie, we headed up and over the eastern rim of the caldera and then down to the eastern coast of the Banks Peninsula, to East Cypress Bay Sheep Station.

This station is made up of an entire gigantic valley that runs down and widens out from the eastern volcanic rim right down to a mile-long golden sand bay, which is flanked on both sides by straight-up cliffs. Straight up five hundred feet to headlands that stretch away north and south to the neighboring valley sheep stations.

About a quarter of a mile up the valley from the golden beach there is a beautiful stand of cypress trees that were planted by the first European settlers here, one hundred and sixty-five years ago. Cupressus macrocarpa, Monterey Cypress.

“Come with me, lads, and I’ll show you the sheep station first while the missus finishes her scones. We’ll take the quad bike out and about. So you can see the entire farm, an overview, lads, then we’ll come back for a bite and a hot cuppa.”

We were lads to him because the old man was in his eighties. But he moved around like a teenager.

His red wind-and-sun-burned face had more wrinkles than a dried cranberry, his snowy white hair was fluffing out in all directions like the seeds of a dandelion, and his canvas jacket had to be as old as New Zealand.

That jacket probably came out here on Captain Cook’s first voyage in the late 1700s. When I looked at the holes in the elbows, they were so big that I thought the missing material could have supplied the mainsail on the good ship Endeavor.

We jumped on the back of the quad bike and I have to tell you that the old fellow drove like the famous New Zealand boy-racers that had kept us awake for the better part of a night in Blenheim.

Those infamous young ‘hoons’ of Blenheim. Hoons. We’d call them reckless driving hooligans back in the States.

“Hold on tight, lads, hold on, here we g—”

We were off.

Well, I thought, Albert is nothing more than an old hoon. Beau and I clung to the back of the quad bike as Albert gunned it up the steep and rocky hillside of the valley.

“Up and up and up we go!” he yelled out as my life passed before my eyes more than a few times.

“She’s a good piece of equipment, this. A good enough machine. Though I miss me horses. Gotta keep up with our modern world, though.

“Right, so here we are, Lads.”

Where we were was the northern top ridge of the East Cypress Bay Valley. Here Beau and I fell off the quad bike when Albert slammed it to a stop.

We immediately started running after the old man, who was now striding out across the broad headland like a broker on Wall Street who was late for the opening bell.

He, and we, stopped at the edge of the sheer volcanic sea cliff, which plunged vertically to the roiling Pacific. The wind was fierce, the sky was blue, the turbulent ocean crashed against the majestic cliff below.

Here there were only three people in the entire world. Albert, Beau, and I stood alone on that high headland. We were too insignificant to be noticed, if there had been anybody to notice us.

It’s a largely empty world, I thought.

“Next bay over,” yelled Albert into the wind as he indicated with a jerk of his head, “just next door, over this headland, over at Gough’s Bay, there was once a small Maori settlement.

“But not here at Cypress Bay,” he stamped his foot and flung out his arm in a wide arc, “she was never settled by no persons, no Maori, no Pakeha, no body. Until me own grandfather settled this land in 1864.

“The last bay on the Banks Peninsula to be settled by Europeans, the last bay to be settled by anybody. And this bay, well, it was me grandpa who cleared the forest h’self. Built our house, sold off the ret of the timber and then started this sheep station. The first human beings ever to live here. That’s us.” He thumped his chest.

Tears were running down Albert’s old weathered cheeks, running freely.

“Maori never settled here but it was known to them, sure. Waikerikari. Bay of Angry Waters. And look below, lads, look below to those angry waters. I have seen those waves crash against this cliff as high as where we are standing here on top. Aye. Seen it from the kitchen window yonder on many a wild winter’s day.”

He pointed back down the way we had come to the homestead house on the far side of the Cypress Bay Valley.

Suddenly, the old man turned back to the ocean and held out both hands as though he would embrace its vast expanse. He began to shout into the wind.

“Much have I traveled in the realms of gold!

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen!

Round many western islands have I been!

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold!

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told!

That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne!

Yet never did I breathe its pure serene!

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold!

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies!

When a new planet swims into his ken!

Into his ken, me lads!

Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes!

He stared at the Pacific and all his men!”

Albert let fall his arms.

“…and all his men looked at each other with a wild surmise!”

Albert screamed into the wind now, even louder.

“Silent, upon a peak in Darien!”

Never have I experienced such a performance. And the tears flowed even more freely now down Albert’s cheeks.

At last I had to ask him.

“Albert. Albert, why are you selling Cypress Bay? It is so beautiful. And you love it here so much.”

“Lads. Me wife. Me missus, she wants to move to the city. And I am old now so I told her yes, we can go, you have stayed here with me all these long and hard years. We can go to the city.”

“Christchurch,” I mumbled sadly. “Christchurch is a lovely city, Albert.”

“Christchurch?! No, no, no, me lad! She’s moving us inside the cauldron! Moving us to Akaroa.”

Hours later, we were back at the Homestead. We stepped up onto the verandah of the old, two-story Victorian mansion, built by Albert’s grandfather and where Albert was born in 1921.

The huge, white gingerbread house could have been sitting on any of the best streets of San Francisco but was, instead, situated here in the Cypress Bay Valley and it looked out towards the soaring cliffs down near the broad beach.

Inside the hallway, we followed Albert’s lead and took off our shoes, leaving them near the door. The long and broad, kauri-wood wainscoted hall ran straight back about forty feet or more and had doors leading off it on both sides.

There, at the end of the hall was a tremendous mirror that covered the back wall. It was two meters wide and at least five meters high. A single big crack ran diagonally from the upper left-hand corner all the way down to the lower right-hand corner.

“So here is what happened, me lads,” said Albert as he paused midway in the hall.

“Me grandfather built this house and me father expanded it in ’04.

“1904, of course. All new furnishings, they was carted over the hills from Christchurch to Akaroa, to the cauldron, to that Big Smoke, carted by wagon. Then up and out of the cauldron, over the hills here to East Cypress Bay.

“This looking-glass here,” he pointed, “this looking-glass made it intact, all that way. And she was mounted carefully on the wall here and framed beautifully, as you can see for yourself.

The next morning, early, after me mum and pa’s first night in the new house, what do they hear but someone dancing about on the verandah, banging on the door as if to raise the devil from hell himself. Me father, downstairs he rushes, throws open the door, and there is Mr. Billy Goat standing at the threshold.

“Mr. Billy Goat sees himself in the looking-glass at the end of the hall, he lowers his head and is hell-bent on a fight, down the hall he flies and ram! Into the mirror!

“The mirror has been here, broken like this, for over one hundred years, lads. ‘She was meant to be broken,’ me father said. And so she hangs there broken for over one hundred years. Come now, me lads, into the kitchen.”

He led the way to the end of the hall and we followed him left into a giant kitchen, where we were enveloped by the smell of fresh-baked bread and scones and by the effusive welcome of Penelope, still standing at a giant wood-burning stove.

Her name was actually Victoria but when she married Albert so many years before, she asked everyone to call her Penelope.

“We didn’t want to be known as Victoria and Albert, you know. We do love the royal family, don’t get us wrong. But I didn’t want to sound like a museum,” she said.

A part of England that no longer exists in England, I thought.

Victoria, I mean Penelope, poured tea and hot milk into delicate bone-china cups. This lovely old couple, they are sort of museum pieces after all, I thought.

As Penelope poured cup after cup of Earl Grey tea, I gazed out the house’s only modern feature — a huge picture window took up a large portion of the ocean side of the kitchen, the kitchen that had been expanded out into the English garden, established a hundred years ago by Albert’s long-dead mum.

Half a mile off, the angry waters of the mis-named Pacific crashed dramatically into the soaring cliffs of East Cypress Bay, on both sides of East Cypress Bay Beach.

I thought of that gigantic mirror hanging so long, cracked from top to bottom, distorting the world in its view.

It never occurred to me that Albert was lying. About Mr Billy Goat. About the broken mirror. It never entered my mind.

END OF CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

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Aaron Allbright’s novel in five parts will be published soon.