The Trespass (48 page)

‘I am not a distressed gentlewoman. I have money, as I told you. And I am certainly not looking for a husband.’

‘Not you, Harriet. I did not mean you.’

‘But it is true I have been trained for
nothing.
Nothing at all. I will have to learn.’ And she got up from the fire.

‘Goodnight, dear Edward,’ she said. ‘I am so glad to have found you.’

Outside his house he heard her rustling and moving quietly. Edward sighed. He was, of course, responsible for her. They seemed not to have got very far, but at least they had spoken of her situation. Slowly he doused the fire and made his way to where the small tent and his bracken bed and his gun waited for him. The new dog curled up and sighed outside and at once they were both asleep.

Inside the house Hetty and Miss Eunice slept uneasily in their new surroundings: both of them made little restless noises of agitation; several times Hetty cried out in pain and then was quiet again. Both of them had removed their corsets which hung, ghostly shapes, over Edward’s only chair, their laces touching the floor. Harriet realised, touched, that Miss Eunice must have helped the servant girl to undress. She added her own corset to the pile, then lay very still until she heard Edward settle inside his tent. It was cold now, she pulled her blanket tighter round her shoulders.

She had almost fallen asleep when Edward’s unthinkable words suddenly shouted in her head,
he could be on the next ship,
and she sat bolt upright. Suddenly the little house seemed so full of hauntings and terror that she gasped aloud, buried her face in a cushion so that the others would not hear. It was so long since she had felt that terror: she had thought it was over but suddenly they were back, the old panic and the fear and the secret disgust that made the blood drain from her face,
ain’t you done it, don’t you miss it,
these things that she had thought, on board the
Amaryllis,
that she had defeated. Then the unpleasant vision of the soft-footed Peters flashed again into her mind, like a punishment and a warning: for it was Peters that her father would send. She could not imagine, could not conceive that Sir Charles Cooper would sail across the sea,
she simply could not think it.
She did not know how long she lay there, almost paralysed with panic and fear and the terrible loud beating of her heart:
I will have to go away from here; I must not be found; Peters must not find me, I will have to go away tomorrow.
And suddenly into her mind came the oak tree, the one oak tree in Bryanston Square. Some time towards morning, she slept.

*   *   *

Next morning they found clear cold blue skies and the sun coming up from behind the high hills. Edward had already gone up the hill with his axes and his dog: they could hear the echo of the axe falling against wood as they performed their ablutions; they could hear it still as the three of them contemplated again the raw meat. All three of them looked at their surroundings with some suspicion: in daylight it clearly was not a farm, and who knew what lurked in the bushes. Miss Eunice seemed much recovered but at a loss as to how to proceed; Hetty’s face was haggard with pain but still she said: ‘I think we should wash Mr Edward’s biggest pan and put that meat stuff in and put water in it and put it on the fire. It will cook that way. That’s how people cook. That’s how me mum cooked potaters.’ She tried to help to lift the big, dirty pot, her face twisted with pain. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry, Miss Harriet, as soon as me arm recovers I’ll do it all.’

Nobody had a better plan: Miss Eunice and Harriet between them, with much distaste but much determination, scrubbed at the pot.
I must go. I must go today.

Hetty would have laughed at the gentlewomen working if she had not been in such pain; suddenly, they swam before her eyes as they filled the pot with bones and flesh of they knew not what animal and put it on to the fire that Edward had lit again when he woke. When Harriet looked round for further instructions from Hetty, Hetty had fainted. In alarm, they lifted her on to the bed, she cried out over and over again with pain but saying also, ‘I’m sorry, Miss Harriet, I knocked it again when I tried to lift the pot, I’m sorry for this trouble.’

‘Run for Edward,’ Harriet instructed Miss Eunice, and then could not help smiling at the sight of the sober brown dress hurrying upwards with ungainly steps and falling often into the green bushes, calling, ‘Mr Cooper! Mr Cooper!’ She bathed Hetty’s face, trying to calm her, told her, not meaning it unkindly, that Miss Eunice looked like a sprightly mountain goat.

‘That Miss Eunice,’ said Hetty weakly, tears of pain still running down her face, ‘would turn herself into a sprightly mountain tiger python if anyone got in the way of her plans for Mr Edward.’

Harriet laughed. ‘Mr Edward,’ she said, ‘is quite able to look after himself. He is a very stubborn man.’

Edward came back with Miss Eunice; they were both carrying water from the spring. Miss Eunice was carrying almost as much as Edward: once again Harriet felt her original opinion of the older woman alter. Edward looked at Hetty’s face, rummaged in one of his boxes from England, came back to where she was lying on his bed. He was carrying his old school cricket bat, a child’s cricket bat. Despite her protests he gently took her arm; it moved and crunched to his probing and Hetty gave a scream which she tried to contain.

‘Hetty,’ said Edward firmly, ‘it will only get worse if we leave it. The arm absolutely must be re-set. I am so afraid it is poisoned inside. I know—’ as she protested, ‘I am not a doctor, but something must be done, otherwise we need to take you back to Wellington and I think the journey would be very difficult for you. It can only get worse if we leave it. I’ve done things like this on the farm if you will trust me.’

‘I ain’t a cow,’ said Hetty faintly.

‘We could use the cricket bat as a splint,’ he continued. ‘The arm must be pulled out and set correctly for you to be able to use it again. And then I could put the whole thing, your arm and the cricket bat, into a big sling in one of my shirts. And my father gave me his best whisky, look! That would help.’

Hetty looked at the cricket bat, at Edward, at the whisky. The other two women looked troubled at Edward’s bizarre plan: neither of them thought it wise for Hetty to agree. The sun shone in through the door and they could hear birds, and the gentle sea below. Hetty made a sudden lunge for the whisky, gulped down enough to have made the strongest English gentleman buckle.

‘Do it,’ she said, ‘quick!’ and then screamed and screamed as Edward did: pulled it and heard a sound of bone, straightened it and tied it to the cricket bat, remembering how he’d saved his dog.

Harriet, staring at the sea, frightened that they may have damaged Hetty further, told herself she could not think about leaving until Hetty improved; she must take Hetty with her. Miss Eunice, taking her turn at bathing Hetty’s face, thought she had never seen such a heroic man as Edward in her life and almost wished it was her own arm that had been broken. Edward looked very pale at his temerity and he stared at Hetty, seemed not to be able to take his eyes off her as she lay, so
unlikely,
on his bed. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have tried,’ he said several times. ‘We should have taken her back to Wellington.’

Then Hetty slept deeply at last, slept and slept and slept. Once she opened her eyes and said, ‘I think I’m making up for all the sleep I never had, all me life at the glue factory,’ and fell immediately asleep again. Later she opened her eyes again. ‘I just worked out that my arm’s been hurting for more than sixty-five days,’ she said. And she smiled at Edward and fell asleep again.

More hopeful now, the others took turns to endeavour to eat some rather strange boiled mutton; it was not properly cooked, and yet they agreed some progress had been made, decided to put it back in the pan and cook it again for next day: they were tired now of stale bread, carrots and cheese.

‘Throw the carrots in,’ instructed Edward but his mind was elsewhere, he must have lost his sense of proportion to go round breaking pretty servant girls’ arms.

On the evening of the second day Hetty suddenly sat up. ‘It’s not hurting the same,’ she announced. ‘I’m hungry.’ The others looked at each other in delight and relief. Miss Eunice had ascertained that Edward had some rather good silver in one of his boxes and a damask tablecloth. She laid the tablecloth and then set the table from Kent with knives and forks that would not have disgraced Windsor Castle. They sat on boxes, and they all ate mutton stew and carrots. And although the water was fatty and the meat was now tough and overcooked and the carrots had turned to an orange scum, they pronounced themselves extremely satisfied in the circumstances.

‘I owe you one, Mr Edward. I won’t forget,’ said Hetty and she laughed. And there was something about the way she said the words, and the way she laughed, that meant something else, that meant she was her own cheeky, charming self again. And because she had colour in her cheeks and was obviously going to get better Harriet and Edward laughed with Hetty in relief, and nobody noticed Miss Eunice’s sudden, quick intake of breath.

*   *   *

Then the weather turned suddenly much colder, and a gale blew over from the town. The sea stirred up and then crashed not so far from them. Rain was coming: they could see it across the harbour. Edward at first thought of putting up some sort of curtain inside the shack, hanging it from his rafters to give the women privacy but himself at least some shelter. But he imagined the odd intimacy of noise: all the rustling skirts removed, Hetty’s skirt removed, the women turning in their sleep, his own night sounds. So as the storm approached he tied more split logs together to make a rough lean-to against an outside wall of the shack, Harriet and Miss Eunice held the logs as he nailed them and bound them, with his tarpaulin as roof for some shelter that also covered the fireplace. Next time he was in town he would buy more wooden tiles for a permanent roof: there was a kind of satisfaction in his shack getting bigger. He cleared the slanting drains that the natives had laid for him. Hetty wandering about in the wind gave a scream: the cow was bellowing because she hadn’t been milked and the hens had laid seven eggs underneath the cart.

The storm came, rain lashing the hillside. The human beings played chess and whist while the rain poured and the sea crashed on the shore just below them. The horses sheltered behind the lean-to as best they could, the dog lay miserably under the cart with the hens. The cow remained stoical at the front of the house while the inhabitants drank her milk. Edward and Harriet read and re-read the letters from Rusholme that had travelled with Harriet on the
Amaryllis,
telling of Mary, the death of Mary. Once Harriet went and stood outside and her tears and the rain mingled and she wondered to herself if anyone really recovered, from grief. Hetty wiped up with her good arm water that drifted under Edward’s door and entertained them with stories of the glue factory; the little house was filled with her indignant laughter, the others could not believe her life had been so harsh.

‘That’s why I came,’ she kept saying, ‘and look at me now, living like a lady,’ but she was careful to watch for the water all the time, and to sweep round the fire and fold up the blankets. It was Hetty too, who cheerfully with her good arm and with total lack of embarrassment emptied the contents of the chamber pots the ladies used in the night, into the bushes.

Miss Eunice read to them from the latest copy of
The New Zealand Spectator and Cook’s Strait Guardian.

Queen Victoria went to the Annual Highland fete in September.

(It did strike Harriet that the news was so old that they had all been in Great Britain when this event occurred.)

Her appearance was hailed by deafening cheers which the distant echoes caught and reverberated far up among the hills.

Her Majesty looked exceedingly well though much exposure to the sun’s influence had somewhat embrowned her complexion.

‘Oh look, Mr Cooper, thirty tons of salt has arrived in the harbour, and twenty barrels of cement and four bales of grey calico. Well. And gentlemen’s white long cloth shirts, Mr Cooper, with Irish linen fronts and wrists.’ Miss Eunice read to him as if she was his wife. And she sighed. ‘I would give anything,’ she said, ‘for the
Illustrated London News.
’

As night fell they lit candles. Harriet and Edward allowed themselves sometimes to speak of Mary. Miss Eunice enquired whether Mary had been named after the blessed Virgin; Harriet explained that on the contrary she had been named after Mary Wollstonecraft of whom the others had not heard.

‘She believed in the rights of women,’ said Harriet.

A long silence followed her remark, Edward cleared his throat in embarrassment and Miss Eunice’s lips were slightly pursed. Hetty looked uninterested. They heard the rain drumming on the roof, and in several places drips fell downwards into the house but Hetty, understanding that the earth floor must be kept dry, put tins underneath the drips and wiped the wet floor with rags, and with the newspapers when Miss Eunice had finished with them.

Then Hetty, working on the success of her first cooking idea, went and put the newly laid eggs in a pan of water on the partially covered fire; she came back rather wet and dried her hair with one hand while another game of whist was played by the others. She had never known that people lived like this,
playing cards all day long, as if life allowed that.

Miss Eunice took little glances at Hetty, a servant drying her hair so casually in front of a gentleman, she could hardly believe her eyes. If she told her brother this he would not believe it either. Somehow although she was fully clothed, Hetty looked
undressed
in some odd way that Miss Eunice could not articulate in her mind. Something about the way, in the confines of the small room, she
moved,
even though one arm was tied to a cricket bat. Miss Eunice wondered if she could suggest that Hetty went back to Wellington town. She cheered herself with observing that Edward seemed sunk in his own thoughts; perhaps he was not noticing Hetty and her long wet hair. Eunice Burlington Brown had invented desperate little pictures of herself and men on the long journey from England on the
Amaryllis:
of Mr Aloysius Porter, of Mr Edward Cooper, seeing herself married, being someone’s wife. But when Edward had mended Hetty’s arm he had suddenly become real. For such a caring man she would carry water for the rest of her life: no man of her acquaintance would have done what Edward Cooper did, for a woman.