The Trespass (44 page)

Colours appeared as well as the bright, dark green bush: yellow flowers, dark red trees in bloom. Coloured birds that looked like strange parrots flashed inquisitively by. At dusk the
Amaryllis
cast anchor for the first time. They were near the top of the southern island and there they would wait till morning: the straits between the two islands were too dangerous to navigate in the darkness.

Even the steerage passengers were given a pig to roast; at the Captain’s table fresh meat and vegetables were savoured, healths were drunk, speeches were made and everyone was aware of the odd silence: there were no sails and the sea was calm. Mrs Burlington Brown and the magistrate’s wife had made their peace and vowed eternal friendship. (Again Mr Burlington Brown thought that the sooner he got his wife off the ship the better: she was becoming effusive, that was the only word for it, and she had spoken to him most sharply when he had mentioned the dreadful state of the feathers on her hat.)

There was speculation about friends and relations, about Mr Nicholas Tennyson’s older brother who had come here a year ago, about Miss Harriet Cooper’s cousin, Edward, the gentleman farmer. Miss Eunice Burlington Brown asked Harriet more questions about her cousin, her recovered heart beat in anticipation.

‘There is no way of knowing of course,’ said Captain Stark, ‘when the
Miranda
might have arrived – she left three weeks before us and for all we know she could have arrived many days ago. But you have seen what the weather can do. The
Miranda
could even be behind us. We made record time through the Bay of Biscay but then we were becalmed. The whole journey has occasionally been done in under ninety days – and over two hundred with the worst of luck. We have had a lonely run with no news of anyone, but sometimes three or four ships are long delayed in the Bay, and I have seen a dozen vessels becalmed together in the tropics for weeks on end. You will have to wait a little longer, Miss Cooper, for news of the
Miranda.
’

Mr Nicholas Tennyson and Mr Aloysius Porter had been told of hotels in Wellington where passengers could stay. Captain Stark advised Harriet of very respectable lodgings for young gentlewomen. ‘Those hotels along the waterfront,’ he said, ‘are no place for an unchaperoned young woman.’ Mr Burlington Brown seemed disinclined to give up his role of guardian, made suggestions that Harriet should stay with him and his wife and Miss Eunice. Harriet smiled her beautiful smile at everyone and thanked them for their advice.

The Captain wanted Harriet to sing, as she had so often on the long journey, but the piano had become so damp and so out of tune that such a final performance was not possible. Miss Eunice Burlington Brown surprised everyone, especially her brother, by offering to recite a dramatic poem
Casablanca
‘written by the late lamented poetess Mrs Felicia Henman’, and immediately launched into

The boy stood on the burning deck

    Whence all but he had fled;

The flame that lit the battle’s wreck

    Shone round him o’er the dead.

She recited all ten verses and was applauded resolutely.

*   *   *

Such was the feeling that they had already landed, that their journey was at last over, that the passengers were extremely surprised and not a little put out to find themselves spending the next night strapped to their beds once more. The straits between the two islands were indeed treacherous. Again and again the Captain had tried to make for Wellington with only the foreshortened mainsail, again and again the ship was turned about by the wild winds. Finally, at dawn on the second day, the winds died down and a cold sea fog came down over the
Amaryllis
so that she might have been in the South Atlantic still. But the fog lifted and the sun began to shine and Captain Stark was able at last to sail his brave and stalwart
Amaryllis
through the heads and into the port of Wellington town.

Harriet, at the rail as soon as she felt the winds subside at first light, gasped.

For there was the magical harbour she had first seen in the drawing in Edward’s book, only now she could see it in truth: the small wooden dwellings, the enclosed blue bay, the green tree-covered hills, the sea. But as they came closer she saw that it was different from the picture: there were many more small dwellings, they had spread upwards on to the foothills, the sun caught their roofs. There were fewer green trees. And the hills rose up so high: where would the farms be? There were murmurs of anxiety amongst the passengers. But the calm waters of the harbour sparkled in the morning sunshine and the sky was as she remembered seeing it, leading upwards forever and giving the feeling of infinite space. And there was no wind at all.

She breathed in the fresh, calm air and thought she could smell grass. Smoke rose straight upwards from the chimneys of the little houses. A crowd of tiny birds flew over the
Amaryllis
as if in welcome. Somewhere there on the shore, surely, was her favourite cousin, the kind, rotund and smiling Edward Cooper.

In this place she would make her life. She had no fear at all.

This would be her Home. Sweet Home.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Edward Cooper dreamed night after night of wild, tangled, vicious native bush.

It was trying to destroy him.

He had good reason to recall his father’s words:
never buy land without seeing it.
What, on the survey maps of the New Zealand Company, had looked like prime farming acres ready for cultivation had turned out to be unsurveyed, bush-covered hillside stretching up to the sky and down to the sea, only reachable from Wellington town by boat; or by a day and a half’s trek, first along fair roads (by the standards of the town) but later through bush and trees along muddy overgrown tracks full of treacherous roots and stumps, then along rocky tidal beaches that tore at horses’ shoes on every journey. The ‘choice’ they were promised was between one section and the one next to it, or the one next to that, all in the same place. Even his ‘town half-acre’ was over two hours’ march on half-roads. Edward, who was as optimistic and positive as an immigrant could hope to be, had found his cheerful manner sorely tried.

His friends Chapman and Lyle quickly made their choice: angrily they tried to sell their land back to the New Zealand Company; when this failed they advertised the sections in the
Wellington Independent
and
The New Zealand Spectator and Cook’s Strait Guardian
and decided to venture up the coast where they had heard the opportunities for good land were much better: flat land (they were told), rivers, roads of a kind. They would not be able to afford to buy unless their initial capital was realised, but they could rent or lease, even (it was said) from the natives. Sheep-farming was the answer (they were advised); it wasn’t what the New Zealand Company had planned for farmers but it was turning out to be the most profitable way of using much of this new country. All three of them bought horses: the friends prepared to part. Edward told them he would begin clearing land for his house – not on his town section but on his hillside, a day and a half from town.

‘If I am to work the land,’ said Edward, ‘I must live on the land. I am a farmer.’

‘That is a ludicrous plan,’ said Chapman. ‘That land is absolutely hopeless. Come with us.’

‘No,’ said Edward.

‘Eddie, you’re a farmer. What you have been given is not farming land, it is wild bush-covered mountains. Come with us.’

‘No,’ said Edward.

Chapman and Lyle looked at each other: both had the same thought. They could not leave Edward without helping him: he was intractable, but he was their friend. They went back around the coast with half of Edward’s belongings, wondering if a second look would somehow prove the land better than they had thought. But nothing had changed: still the high, bush-covered hills stretched upwards. There had to be somewhere for Edward to live: the three men worked from dawn until dusk in sunshine and rain and the Wellington wind; no-one had warned them of the wind. It was unfamiliar, back-breaking, harsh physical work. They chopped down some of the smaller trees; hacked at tangled, springing native bush; tried to burn a clearing but had much difficulty with damp undergrowth; finally cleared with their axes the best flat space near the sea. In the evenings, exhausted, they sat beside a fire, tearing at old bread and salted pork. They talked of sheep-farming; talked of England. They wondered if gold would be found in New Zealand as it had been in America, Canada, Australia: surely there will be gold here, they said, as they stared at the malign forest. They talked of the disaffected natives who, they had been warned, still stalked the land: always made sure their guns were near when they slept at night. They talked of the women in Wellington town who were obviously looking for husbands: they knew it would be years before they could afford the luxury of a wife and they turned, unsettled, on their lonely mattresses.

Once they had a cleared a place for Edward’s house they then completely cleared a small part of the hillside and turned the earth for planting because Edward insisted, and cleared some land around the fresh spring, the one asset on the hillside. Once they heard a strange rumbling sound and felt the ground shake beneath them: they waited almost mesmerised for the land to open, this was one of the famous earthquakes, but the rumbling disappeared into nothing and they felt almost cheated. Once they caught sight briefly of an animal, a large pig or a large dog, reached for their guns, but the animal disappeared back into the bush. They caught their first fish, burnt it over their fire and drank the fresh pure water from the spring and talked of the London cholera. So often the wind blew, but on the calm nights under the stars, eating fresh fish as strange birds and insects called and the sea lapped below them, all three of them – despite their anger and disappointment and sheer physical exhaustion – declared that it was perhaps, after all, an adventure worth having, for England.

When enough land had been cleared for Edward to at least start, when enough good logs for building had been piled high, Chapman and Lyle – assured by their friend that he could build a shelter by himself, that he was a fine builder with long experience of such work on his father’s farm – made their decision to press northwards to try and settle somewhere before winter came. Edward rode back into the town with them, spent the night before they went at one of the waterfront hotels. Accordions played, men’s voices sang of the girls they left behind them, other girls called in the dark from along the quay. Natives sat in little groups where their canoes lay on the shore, talking long into the night in their strange, soft language.

The three men drank ale from England, hoped to meet again, Edward clasped their hands in farewell and thanked them for their friendship.

*   *   *

He bought a small cart, hitched it to his horse, engaged three natives to help him carry everything round the coast, through the bush and on to his land. They transported the rest of his belongings from England; he bought wooden planks and wooden roof tiles from the Kai Warra Warra mill; he bought better axes, bags of potatoes and flour and pork and other supplies from the stores on the waterfront. Edward had never cooked: Chapman and Lyle had taught him that something at least edible could be obtained if you threw everything into one pot, filled it with water, and left it on the fire. On the journey back to his property the natives entertained him, in quaint English, with fantastical stories of their ancestors, and gossip about other settlers. They taught him to make a bed of the springy bracken that grew everywhere about them; he was surprised at the comfort and smiled at the stars in the middle of the night. They also taught Edward to greet them in their own language:
tena koutou,
he would say to them each morning of their travels. On the morning of the second day it rained. He gathered from the Maoris’ demeanour that they would not be moving any further that day. He put up his tarpaulin again. The natives sat under a tree smoking the new tobacco the English had brought, talking and laughing: Edward presumed they were talking about him. When the rain at last stopped the following morning his employees lifted their sacks and walked cheerfully on through the mud.

When they arrived the Maoris stared at the land, at the place that had been cleared for a dwelling. After talking together in their own language they started jumping on the cleared land in a rather alarming manner, then one of them lay down with his eye at the level of the cleared ground, gave orders to the other two: it took Edward a little time to realise that they were levelling his floor. Then they cut stout branches and tamped at the earth: hitting it, flattening it, compacting it, then sprinkling water on it, until a hard base settled.

‘Thank you,’ said Edward humbly, and understood from them that he must put his tarpaulin over the floor until the house was built above it, that the now firm, level floor must not get wet. Still they had not finished: they looked at the hills behind and dug ditches beside the floor; again Edward understood: they were making him
drains.
They caught a fat bird with a strange snare net, and cooked it on a fire, sharing it with Edward and eating some of his bread. Unasked they nailed the wooden roof tiles together. After several days, in their own time, leaving Edward surrounded by his boxes and his timber and his horse and giving many assurances of friendship, the natives left: so, Edward found later, had many of his precious nails and horseshoes and his best hat.

When darkness fell that night Edward had no idea where the nearest other human being might be and felt the silence of a loneliness he had never known.

*   *   *

In twenty-seven days Edward Cooper, working from first light till darkness, had built himself a rough shack not unlike the one he had practised on at Rusholme, only bigger.

On the sixteenth day when his precarious tarpaulin that was substituting as a roof was taken off in a gale and his beautiful firm floor got wet, he allowed himself, thousands of miles from his loved ones, the luxury of a few angry, disappointed, self-pitying, exhausted swallows of emotion – but understood that an English gentleman never gave way to foolish thoughts and tamped the earth down again, as the natives had done. On the nineteenth day a small party came past in a horse and buggy and he found he had, only an hour away on horseback, neighbours. A whole family who had been here almost a year, with daughters aged fifteen, seventeen and eighteen. To Edward the sight of other human beings – and, what is more, sun-kissed young ladies in pretty gowns and bonnets approaching him smiling and saying he must visit them on Sunday – was more thrilling than had been any other social occasion of his life.