The Trespass (46 page)

At last Edward raised his head from his hands and looked at Harriet, so pleased and yet so shocked to see her. He was still struggling to take in everything but other cogs in his mind began to turn.

‘You came from England
alone?
’ he said in a low, disbelieving voice.

Harriet nodded and he saw that she was proud; that some change of confidence had been wrought in her. He had forgotten how beautiful she was: he always took her for granted because she was his cousin, but he saw that there was something else now in her face, some new strength, some loss of softness. He was not certain that it suited her.

‘How did you persuade Sir Charles to allow you to do that, to travel alone?’ Still he could not take it in. ‘I simply cannot imagine him agreeing, especially after Mary’s death. I cannot see how you persuaded him – I know how fond he is of you.’

Harriet had known that the question would come. She had rehearsed answers. But finally knew she could not speak of her father even to Edward, her dearest cousin:
even had she wanted to she did not have the words.

‘I did not want to stay in Bryanston Square without Mary,’ she said carefully in the small parlour of the wooden hotel in the lamplight, holding her teacup delicately, sitting very straight. And she smiled at Edward through her tears, but her cousin saw a mask come down.

‘But Harriet—’ Edward tried again but they were interrupted.

‘Miss Cooper! Miss Cooper!’ Mr and Mrs Burlington Brown and Miss Eunice Burlington Brown, learning that their erstwhile ward was sitting alone with a man in a public place and weeping, bustled into the public place disapprovingly, requiring introductions immediately. If Miss Eunice Burlington Brown was in any way disappointed in Mr Edward Cooper who had a round face and a rather straggling beard and callused hands (not quite the picture of the gentleman farmer she had been led, she felt, to expect), she nevertheless gave no sign. After the introductions were effected, Edward made shamefacedly for the barber’s shop, in vain Harriet protested that she wished to accompany him. It was arranged by the Burlington Browns that Edward and Harriet (together with the Burlington Browns) would meet at church the next day, Sunday. Harriet was escorted back to the Gentlewomen’s Private Hotel.

Despite his physical exhaustion Edward lay awake in his small hotel almost all of the night: reading over and over again his treasured letters from England written just after he had departed and telling of the terrible death; puzzling over the enigma of Harriet’s sudden appearance; but most of all remembering his dearly beloved cousin Mary. Her face seemed to hover beside him in the small room as if she wanted to speak to him:
why does nobody do anything about the cholera?
she had cried, that afternoon in Bryanston Square; his beloved cousin, Mary Cooper, whom he had known always: limping and stoic and wise. His father’s dear, remembered handwriting lay on the table beside the bed. Men’s drunken voices floated up to his room, and occasionally the laugh of a woman. Grief and shock and loss and distance tugged at Edward’s heart. Finally he turned his face into his pillow and for the first time since he was a boy at school, wept.

*   *   *

The next day, Sunday, they all met at the new Anglican church. The Wellington winds had got up at dawn: nevertheless ladies in hats sat at the front of the church: the hats would not have disgraced St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden (or indeed St Paul’s Cathedral, Blackfriars). Several of the ladies in hats addressed the Burlington Browns and Harriet graciously. A dignified native with a strange, marked face came in halfway through the service, sat at the back, upright as a pillar. Wind blew in under the door and along the aisle, they heard it rattling at the windows and through the pipes of the small organ, sounding an eerie half-note when none had been played. The minister spoke of the new and exciting and difficult life that affected them all, while Miss Eunice Burlington Brown eyed the recently shaven and bathed Edward Cooper with new enthusiasm. The minister’s voice rose and thundered as he instructed that they must not give in to loneliness (loneliness being impossible when God was nigh); nor lawlessness (and he gave an eloquent flash of the eyes to the streets outside). And they must never, he reminded them (his voice reaching a climax), most especially in a new land, forget the teachings of their Lord Jesus Christ. They all lifted their voices to God:

Praise, my soul, the King of Heaven

To His feet thy tribute bring

and Edward with his head bowed prayed for Mary’s soul, and for her life everlasting.

Praise him, praise him

Praise him, praise him

sang the congregation. Edward, singing, hoped he might arrange some time alone with his cousin, to somehow understand how she had suddenly appeared, like a dark angel.

*   *   *

Outside the church Harriet caught sight of Hetty Green, the girl who had broken her arm on board the
Amaryllis.
Her arm was tied in a sling made of a skirt, she looked pale and depressed and would have passed by had Harriet not prevented her.

‘Hetty!’

Reluctantly Hetty stopped by the group of ladies and gentlemen, eyeing the Burlington Browns with less than enthusiasm.

‘Hello, Miss Harriet.’

‘Has your arm not healed?’

‘No,’ said Hetty shortly, ‘it is worse than before. It hurts and it ain’t healing.’ Harriet explained to Edward about the storm. She (and Miss Eunice Burlington Brown) could not help but see Edward looking at the girl and the arm in the sling with interest.

‘Forgive me,’ said Edward to Hetty, ‘I cannot help but notice. Your arm needs to be re-set, it has not knitted properly. Look how the bone protrudes oddly, and it should not move this way.’ Hetty cried out instinctively as he touched the arm, then bit her lip and moved away from him.

‘Shall you be able to work?’ asked Harriet.

‘All the girls have got work, they’re queuing for us. But who would employ me?’ said Hetty.

‘But what will you do?’

‘I dunno what will happen.’ Hetty shrugged and turned away.

‘Mr Cooper,’ said Miss Eunice Burlington Brown prettily, ‘we would very,
very
much like you to take tea with us and tell us about your farm. We have heard so much of you from your cousin Harriet on the journey out.’

‘Indeed,’ boomed her brother. A gentleman farmer would be a good catch and take his sister off his hands at last.

‘I am afraid,’ said Edward rather gloomily, ‘that there is not much to tell. The land I have obtained from the New Zealand Company leaves a great deal to be desired. The contrast between the description of the land I was given in London and the land itself does, I am afraid, call into question the integrity of the Company.’

Harriet who had as yet heard none of Edward’s news looked shocked, remembered Mary’s cautionary words; Mr Burlington Brown looked shocked for different reasons.

‘But I am intimately acquainted with several of the Directors. They are most honourable men, I can vouch for that.’

‘Perhaps then they have not yet visited New Zealand,’ said Edward politely, ‘and know nothing of that which they speak of, in London, so engagingly.’

Mr Burlington Brown looked at Edward sharply. Was Mr Cooper being vaguely impolite? He did not want his sister involved with somebody vaguely impolite. However, he took his sister’s wishes into consideration and ushered his little party to the Mechanics Institute where tea, he knew, was being served to new settlers. Edward again saw the offer of lectures in PHRENOLOGY and TERRESTRIAL MAGNETISM.

As soon as they were settled Harriet turned to her cousin. ‘It took me longer than I’d hoped to find you, Eddie, they told me you had gone north with your friends. Now I should like to visit your farm. I should like to go back with you.’

Mr and Mrs Burlington Brown bristled with disapproval. ‘You cannot just take off into the New Zealand wilds,’ they said to Harriet. ‘What would your father say?’ Then they turned to Edward. ‘What servants do you have?’ they asked. ‘What travelling arrangements?’

‘I am afraid,’ said Edward, ‘that there is only me. My companions have gone north, I am still deciding what plans my future will take. My land is over a day’s trek from Wellington, or some hours by boat. I have built myself a small one-roomed house on my land: that is all.’

‘A house!’ said Harriet joyfully. ‘You did it, as you said you would.’

‘Well then of course it is impossible.’ Mr Burlington Brown spoke decisively. ‘Harriet cannot go and visit you, it would not be proper.’

‘I think you will perhaps find when you have been here just a little longer that what constitutes things being proper is of necessity a little different here,’ began Edward mildly but Mr Burlington Brown interrupted him.

‘Mr Cooper, I have been here for some days and I have visited India and I think I can say that I understand very clearly what needs to be done in a colonial settlement of this kind. I am not just here on behalf of the Starlight Gas Company. People like my wife and myself are here to make sure that what is proper at home is also proper here, that standards are maintained at all times. I am sure you will agree that it is quite out of the question for your cousin to visit you anywhere without a chaperone of some kind, particularly in a one-roomed house.’

Somehow the picture of a chaperone in his one-roomed shack made Edward laugh and just as he did so Harriet said: ‘I intend to take Hetty Green with me as my maid,’ and at exactly the same moment Miss Eunice Burlington Brown said, ‘I, of course, will chaperone Harriet. It is right that she would want to see her cousin’s farm, her father would expect it of her.’

*   *   *

Thus it was that somehow (he still wasn’t quite sure how) a bemused Edward Cooper who had been so alone, who had longed one night for the rustle of petticoats, was to be visited by three rustling-skirted ladies at once. In vain he tried to explain the difficulties they would face: Miss Eunice and Harriet packed small valises with enthusiasm. (Harriet, alight with excitement, informed a storage house that she would collect her meagre furniture very soon.) Hetty Green’s belongings were in a small bundle. Edward bought a cow for twelve guineas, an expensive but necessary addition to his belongings; and six hens, and a dog as he had planned, but finally decided he would leave his decisions about sheep-farming or labour-hiring or timber-selling for his next town visit. He was sure the ladies would not stay long.

As they prepared to leave the town, intelligence from the natives spread around Wellington that the new, fast sailing ship the
Seagull,
sailed from the coast of Africa and carrying incense and myrrh (the natives got much of their information from the Bible), was not far out at sea. Edward paused, undecided, but then judged that it might take days or even weeks for the vessel to drop anchor in Wellington harbour and that a cargo ship from Africa was not likely to have more mail from England; Harriet encouraged him to leave at once, herself wanting no news at all. Nobody knew that the cargo ship had a special consignment: some of the shipwrecked passengers of the
Cloudlight
who had been picked up from Tristan da Cunha. And nobody in the small colonial town knew yet that the
Lord Fyne
had been buffeted in a storm on to the Tasmanian Coast and had yet again had to undergo repairs. Now the
Lord Fyne
was crossing the Tasman Sea also; could almost see the long low New Zealand coastline that the natives when they first saw it in the distance had named the land of the long white cloud. Sir Charles Cooper stood on deck straining his eyes, as if his daughter might be standing, miraculously, at the jetty, waiting for her father. And Peters lay still vomiting below, having been terrified almost to death by the journey, planning revenge on Miss Harriet Cooper who had brought him to this.

*   *   *

None of Edward’s lady visitors wanted to get on another boat of any description; in vain Edward told them it would only take hours rather than days; the winds had not subsided and his guests were adamant: they wanted to see something of the environs, not toss about on a small boat. He found that they, including the cow, could ride in a miller’s cart round the harbour as far as the river.

‘But we will still need another horse,’ said Edward. Harriet accompanied him, greatly interested, as he walked to the end of the foreshore into a Maori village where for some time he exchanged pleasantries with several natives, some discussion about a floor ensuing. ‘They helped me take my belongings round the road and start my house,’ he explained to his cousin. And then, bargaining and with some laughter, he acquired a brown mare with dark liquid eyes which gazed at Harriet in her mourning clothes with much the same interest as the natives did. The Maoris did not have a saddle for sale; they walked back, Edward leading the mare, to a store on the waterfront. He insisted on hiring a lady’s side-saddle: ‘I can ride without a saddle if needs be,’ he said, ‘but I cannot imagine Mr Burlington Brown agreeing to your journey under any circumstances if we do not have the correct saddle for young ladies! And I can easily sell the horse again, next time I come to town.’

Mr and Mrs Burlington Brown waved them off in the miller’s cart with the greatest disapproval; only the prospect of getting their sister married prevented them from withholding their permission (though it was given much against their better judgement) for this ludicrous journey.

They travelled on the coast road around the harbour. After reaching the river in the cart they embarked on the difficult journey into the wild bush tracks and along the coast with less complaint than Edward had anticipated: Harriet with a sense of joy and adventure and freedom, Miss Eunice with absolute steely determination and carrying a rubber mattress, and Hetty Green with extreme stoicism, in great pain, grateful that somebody was paying her wages. Harriet rejoiced in riding again. Miss Eunice sat respectably side-saddled and upright when it was her turn but often had to dismount to disappear mysteriously into the bushes. Hetty Green had never ridden a horse in her life but the horse could not do much more than walk through the tortuous paths and the trees and pain made her brave; she sat holding on for grim death with one arm, her face as white as chalk, and said not a word. Sometimes as they travelled Harriet and Edward had some privacy to talk further. She gave him a brief account of her leaving; to Edward it was clear although she did not say it in so many words: she had done a thing unheard of amongst the people that they knew –
she had run away.
Edward was much more shocked than Harriet had anticipated. They travelled on, Edward hoped for enlightenment. But Harriet did not elaborate, stared at the dark green bush-covered hills in amazement, washed her face in the river where they slept the night under trees – as if sleeping under tarpaulin and disappearing quietly into the bush if she needed to were matters she had been trained for. Miss Eunice did her best also, determined not to complain, but her face was extremely pale and it was clear – not of course that anyone would have dreamt of mentioning the subject – that she was having some trouble with her bowels and that the beauty of the green hills was not a consolation. Hetty Green lay on the bush mattress Edward had made. She did not sleep, tried not to cry out with the pain of her arm, stared at the hills with wild eyes, wondering if she was to die in a foreign land.