The Trespass (47 page)

It was almost dusk next day when they finally arrived at Rusholme South. There was only time before night fell for Edward to show them his house, and the spring of fresh water up on the hillside. Miss Eunice and Hetty nodded politely at Edward’s building skills but Harriet looked with joy at the name of the house and the painting of her cousins hanging on the wall.

‘And here is Lizzie!’ she said, holding Asobel’s battered doll. ‘Oh Eddie, if we could just
see
them,’ and in a gesture most unlike her she instinctively hugged her cousin.

Edward gave a sudden huge sigh of nostalgia and relief and patted Harriet’s arm; what a difference it made that she stood here and understood what Rusholme South stood for without any explanation. And his mind filled with somewhat incoherent thoughts about families and family ties. But he remained anxious. All the time they had travelled he had waited for her to say something more about her journey, about her father. But she did not.

The first discovery they all made was that, as well as Edward, none of the women could actually cook.

It was a great blow to them all. Hetty was particularly mortified: the specific duties of a lady’s maid had been made clear to her in England by a cousin who worked for a lady in Richmond: sewing, washing, hairbrushing, carrying, cleaning. But cooking was not one of the skills required, cooks and housemaids did the cooking.

‘I think it is going to be rather different in New Zealand,’ said Edward dryly.

‘I thought you might be able to advise me, Hetty,’ said Harriet dubiously, looking at a big parcel of raw meat unloaded from the pack bags on the horse.

‘I’m really sorry, Miss Harriet, but I ain’t a cook,’ wailed Hetty again, clutching her broken arm. ‘I was only in the glue factory, Mum done the cooking when she got in from the early shift. But I’ll teach myself as soon as my arm gets better, see if I won’t!’

‘But I’ve never been in a kitchen,’ said Harriet, ‘how do I start?’
(And was jolted by a memory of a dark night, looking for a knife. She had been in a kitchen.)
She would have killed herself with that knife if she hadn’t escaped. How far away that terror seemed.

‘We didn’t
have
no kitchen!’ said Hetty. ‘We lived in a room, eight of us, that’s why I came! Mind you, Mr Edward, it was a little bit bigger than this room,’ but she said it kindly and despite the pain she was in she grinned at him and Harriet saw something of her old spirit aboard the
Amaryllis
before she broke her arm, and suddenly Hetty’s words came back to her,
don’t you miss it? ain’t you ever done it?
and for some reason Harriet felt her cheeks reddening at the memory.

‘And you’ve got fresh water,’ said Hetty. ‘Think of water coming out of the ground so clean and all I ever seen was standpipes! I feel like rushing right in it, clothes and all. I think, Mr Edward, that that water up there’s one of the most beautiful things I ever seen.’

Miss Eunice had so far remained silent, her bowels still troubling her. The sight of the raw meat did not help. But she wanted to add to the discussion so she offered: ‘Perhaps there are recipe books we could obtain, Mr Cooper? My brother of course had servants but I did help in the kitchen, giving orders and ordering stores and such-like, and I feel that, when perhaps I am a little rested, I will very willingly share anything I know that would be of assistance.’ She spoke so tremulously, so obviously unwell, yet so anxious to please, that Harriet’s heart was touched and she forgave Miss Eunice a hundred crassnesses aboard the
Amaryllis.

‘I have just been putting everything in this,’ said Edward, pointing rather shamefacedly to a pot by the fire. Something mouldy stared out of its depths and although Harriet looked at it in distaste she could not hide her smile as she realised their predicament: her cousin Edward, bemusedly surrounded by women untrained in basic domestic skills, and the small, rough room and all of them exhausted from their journey. The light had faded and there was the sound of the sea, shshshing over the sand below them. The new dog barked outside, chasing something up the hill, and strange insects trilled in the trees.

‘We can make tea,’ said Harriet. ‘And we can light the candles and there is bread. Tomorrow we will try to think of cooking. Edward, I believe I see that you are to be temporarily removed from your new house!’ Edward himself smiled at last.

‘I am a champion in a tent,’ he said.

‘Miss Eunice must have the bed tonight,’ said Harriet. ‘And Hetty could sleep on the rubber mattress. And I will make a mattress from the bracken as you taught me, Eddie, and sleep on a rug on the floor.’ Nobody argued, Edward himself made the tea, he and Harriet tore at the big loaf of bread, Miss Eunice had a small dry crust, but Hetty, now both pale and flushed, could not eat at all. In half an hour Miss Eunice wished to retire and Hetty asked to lie down also.

Edward and Harriet sat quietly at last outside the little house beside the fire, both wrapped in blankets that Harriet recognised from Rusholme, tin mugs of tea on the ground beside them. The night was calm, the moon shone down on the quiet, black sea. Occasionally one of the horses snorted. Edward asked if he might smoke his pipe. The new dog sat between them, looking slightly lost, and for just a moment Harriet thought of Quintus, her dear dog Quintus, in another, different life.

‘That young girl is not at all well,’ said Edward. ‘Her arm has not knitted properly after all that time, I can see the bone move. She is very lucky it has not become poisoned, she could have lost the arm, or even died.’

‘What can we do?’

‘I could try to straighten it, set it again properly.’

‘You are not a doctor!’

‘I am a farmer! But – she looks like a strong girl.’ And Edward stared with an unreadable expression into the darkness and they said nothing more about Hetty Green.

‘It’s lovely here, Edward. It’s beautiful.’

‘But not for a farmer,’ he said gloomily and his cousin remained silent: she had seen it was not a farm.

‘Harriet.’

She saw his earnest, anxious face in the firelight, got up at once to wash the mugs in the water that was warm from the fire.

‘But Harriet, we must talk about this.’ And Edward gave a small inward sigh. He was a practical person, and a kind person, and he did not relish the role that was being forced upon him, but he was Harriet’s only relative here, and he was a man, and he must look after her, he must take a firm stand. ‘I have been thinking about your situation. Have you considered that the next ship might even bring your father here?’

She was caught in the light of the fire as she stood there; the look on her face as she stared back at him was one of such shock that he saw that
she had not considered any such thing.

‘But Harriet,
of course
he will try to find you. Surely you realise that? Whatever did you think would happen? He would have looked for you. He would soon have found out what had become of you, surely, a man with his contacts and influence! And then at the very least he will send messages to the New Zealand Company, they will easily find me, looking for you, and you will be sent back to England. Did you not see everybody take in your arrival? In a small settlement like this everybody soon knows everybody else. And as you have heard, standards must be maintained, even your conduct on the journey out will, I assure you, have been already discussed by people you have not yet had the pleasure of meeting, and certainly they will know you have come here to visit my land across the harbour. Should your father have decided to make the journey himself, I expect it would take him, with his particular contacts, fifteen minutes from stepping ashore to ascertain your whereabouts. Surely you must have realised that!’ He saw that Harriet had not, she stood as if carved from stone, still holding the mugs and staring at him in horror.

‘But, Harriet, whatever did you think would happen? That your father would just forget about you? What would my own father do if Augusta or Alice – or more likely Asobel,’ and he permitted himself a small smile, ‘had for some unthinkable reason done what you had done? My father would go to the ends of the earth to find them again, because he loves them and is responsible for them, and because it would be his duty to do so.’ Still Harriet said nothing.

‘And dearest Harriet, just at this moment I have to be responsible for you. As I would be for my sisters if they were here. It is my duty to be so. I cannot tell you how good it is to actually see you here, sitting in front of me – it’s almost like a dream, you and I sitting here in front of this fire so far from home. It would be wonderful if you were here
safely,
by that I suppose I mean perhaps with your father rather than without him. But—’ and Edward sighed (perhaps he was glad that he was not a young woman to whom these things must be said), ‘I think the freedom of your long journey on the ship has turned your mind. You are not thinking clearly. The journey on the ship is just a hiatus, nothing more: when I was sailing here I often thought of that. Such a long journey is something like a pause in one’s life and everything hangs in abeyance. But journeys end, and you have to pick up the threads of your life again eventually, you cannot sail on and on forever like the Flying Dutchman! Your father is your legal guardian and what you have done you seem to have done without his permission. Wellington may be thousands and thousands of miles away and seem nothing but a frontier town but we live here under English law, we have a governor and courts and magistrates, and I imagine one of the very next ships will bring your father’s instructions.’ (
Harriet saw in her mind Peters, her father’s servant, shadowy in the darkness at the door of Mary’s room; felt suddenly something she thought she had forgotten: the suffocating silence of the house in Bryanston Square and her own terror as she listened for footsteps.
)

She stood up quickly. ‘I will just walk down to the sea and back,’ she said, ‘the moon is as bright as a lantern.’ Edward listened to her footsteps, heard her boots crunching on the pebbles and then there was silence. He stood and stared down into the darkness below, then saw her dark figure, ghostly by the sea, quite still. He thought of how she’d struck him when he first saw her: a dark angel. He watched her carefully, puffing on his pipe, the dog alert now, beside him. An owl, or perhaps a strange native bird, called somewhere nearby. It was not so long ago that his cousins and his sisters had screamed at the sight of a fieldmouse: here Harriet could be confronted by a huge rat in the dark, or a wild pig, or one of the mad Maori hunting dogs that they’d heard lurked in the bush. He had not yet had time to warn her of these things, or to tell her that he always kept his gun near, to tell her that there were rumours about disaffected natives coming back to claim their land they said they had not sold: land that they said had been stolen.

At last Harriet came back: Edward made it clear that she must sit down again and Harriet, slowly, obeyed him. Edward spoke again.

‘What did you think, Harriet – just suppose you had your father’s permission and assistance – that you would do in New Zealand?’ By the firelight her face seemed even paler than he ever remembered it and there was something in her eyes he could not fathom.

‘At least at first, I thought I could help you.’

‘You can see that I am in trouble here. And even should I stay and employ men to help me, it is a man’s work that is needed, you surely understand that.’

‘I am strong.’

‘You are a woman. And you can see the situation, I can hardly help myself. And winter is coming. Ah – I remember how hopeful and confident I was, reading the books at Rusholme. I am afraid the reality is a little different.’

‘But, Eddie.’ Harriet’s beautiful face, all shadows, showed great astonishment. ‘It is beautiful! It is free! It is a new chance!’

Her cousin gave her a very old-fashioned look. ‘It is not free, Harriet, believe me. All my money is tied up in this useless, beautiful, unfarmable land.’

‘I have money, Edward. You can have it. I shall give it all to you, I don’t know how to manage it anyway. And I could at least be your housekeeper.’ Both the cousins involuntarily looked at the tin mugs that had held the tea Edward had been forced to make for them and both of them, just as involuntarily, even in the middle of the serious conversation, laughed.

‘Well, I can learn, Eddie,’ said Harriet, still smiling slightly, moving closer to the fire. ‘I
will
learn. There are books about cooking, I know there are. Mary always told me she and our mother had for years a book called “New Systems of Domestic Cookery Formed Upon Principles of Economy and Adapted For the Use of Private Families”, but try as we would in all the bookcases we could never find it. I’ve never forgotten the title because it made us laugh. Now Mary should see me being punished for my frivolity! But I will find such a book. I will be glad to learn to cook. It will make me feel useful. Also, I would like to teach young children, I enjoyed teaching Asobel.’

But Edward’s face became serious and he shook his head. ‘And your father I remember would not even consent to you teaching
her.
’ He had to look away for a moment from the intensity of his cousin’s expression. ‘Harriet, dear Harriet, just suppose you may stay. You must be realistic about the life here. There are many what they call Distressed Gentlewomen in Wellington. There is nothing so sad, truly. I think—’ and he lowered his voice, ‘forgive me, Harriet, but if I am not mistaken your friend Miss Eunice Burlington Brown seems to be one of those women. They do not have money of their own and were trained for nothing in England except to hope to be wives of gentlemen and that is why many of them came here, I believe, hoping to find a husband – for there are twice as many men as women here. But those unattached men are mostly men like me who simply cannot yet think of the luxury of a wife unless we are prepared to marry below our station – and indeed I have heard that some men have done so and damned the social consequences. They have chosen as a bride someone who can work, rather than someone who cannot and who would expect to have servants as they would at home. So there are dozens of so-called governesses, or music teachers, hoping for the kind of marriage they were reared to in England, in the meantime advertising for work in a discreet and respectable manner, thinking that they can teach young girls to be “ladies”. Their position is sad enough in England, but it is clear that girls here are going to have to learn much more practical things than just being ladies. To cook, for a start.’ Regarding his cousin carefully Edward saw that her eyes glittered: it could have been unshed tears, or it could have been anger that made them shine.