In the quiet of a Friday night in Kerikeri, a fire crept toward one of the most irreplaceable structures in New Zealand — Kemp House, built in 1821 by missionary carpenters and Māori sawyers, a 204-year-old witness to the earliest encounters between two peoples. A storage shed burned to nothing, a café wall was scorched, and the flames stopped just short of the old house, which stood wrapped in plastic sheeting for a roofing repair, unusually vulnerable. Police suspect someone lit the fire deliberately, and the margin between loss and survival was measured not in metres alone, but in the alert