The Trespass (58 page)

In four months perhaps, the news of the death of her father would reach England, and it would be real.

THIRTY-FIVE

Quintus tore across the field, through the big wooden gate, past the house, to where Harriet was sitting in the long grass, brushing at little insects, balancing her ink bottle, and writing. He came up to her barking and panting and wagging his tail, checking she was there, the way he often did. She rubbed his ears and laughed, his wet nose caught her cheek and then he was off again, haring back to the gate. There was so much to do, not just rats but sheep, but he seemed to be smiling.

Harriet was writing a letter to Mr Dawson, of Dawson’s Book Emporium in Oxford Street.

Dear Mr Dawson,

I am writing to send you my very good wishes, to hope that you are very well and to ask you if you will prepare a parcel, or parcels, for me of all the books that you use in all your classes at the Working Men’s Institute. All the books. I have had come upon me a hungry feeling that I want to read everything. I want to read all the philosophy books and all the language books (ancient and modern) and all the history books and all the books on religion and all the novels and all the poets. I include mathematics in my list. All these subjects I at least have spoken of with my dear sister Mary: I will be grateful to be guided by you as to how to proceed further. The only way I can describe my hunger is that I want – if this does not sound too odd – to learn everything in the whole world! I enclose a letter of authorisation for Coutts Bank. I will return to London at some time and come to see you but please in the meantime send me everything you think I will benefit from. I will watch for the ships’ arrivals and wait, every week, to hear from you.

Your friend

Harriet Cooper

PS I would be glad if you would give my greetings to Mr Cecil Forsythe who, like yourself, was so very kind to me, when I was most in need.

She read the letter over. And then, at last, she slowly picked up the old pale notebook that was lying beside her on the grass, the one that her brother Walter had given her, and began to write.

TO THE DEAR READERS OF MY JOURNAL

30 November 1851

Yesterday my cousin Edward married Hetty Green at the little wooden church in the valley, and I baked my first cake. And I wondered, as we sat eating cake and cold mutton in the warm spring sunshine, what Aunt Lucretia would have said, had she been here. Edward has recently had mail from her: ‘
Which
Greens?’ she enquired most anxiously, several times (for he had written of his intentions). But dear Edward told us all that he had written back yesterday to say he was now a married man, a farmer, and the happiest man in New Zealand. Yet Aunt Lucretia will one day discover that her son has married beneath him and she will be mortified, and in my heart I know that I too have much to learn, and that I still struggle to come to terms with the new ways of this new world.

I think of Hetty as I first met her aboard the Amaryllis. She seemed to me then not only a servant but a ‘naughty’ girl, with that – overflowing energy, and her immense attractiveness, and her eye for the sailors, and the things that she said. Some of the things she said disturbed me always. But over this last year and a half I have seen how she has used that same energy to assist and support and encourage Edward: on the land, in the house, from dawn to dusk she has been indefatigable (as is he: they are marvellously suited in that way). I see that sometimes, as he walks past her, he brushes her arm and I have seen how he looks at her, with a kind of wonder – and I do not dare to interpret that wonder too deeply. But I know that Miss Eunice Burlington Brown, a more acceptable choice in many ways, could never have delighted Edward in the way that Hetty Green has delighted him.

But I do hope that it will not be something Edward comes to regret, for I feel they will never be able to go home, to England. I think of his family, my dear relations, around the table in the dining room at Rusholme and I cannot see Hetty, sitting there, with Alice and Augusta and Uncle William and Cousin John. And Asobel. Uncle William said, with tears in his eyes: the sun never sets on the British Empire, let us hear proud things of you. And he would be proud: of how hard Edward has worked, success at last with his wheat, and with his new sheep: financial gain already. But Uncle William would not expect Hetty. Yet I know that
without
Hetty, Edward would not have thrived so well and so happily.

Edward and I have never, in the end, spoken to each other of the things within our hearts. I know that part of him still disapproves of my coming to New Zealand alone, that it has never been satisfactorily explained to him. And I would have liked to ask him if he had realised he could never again sit at ease with his family, with Hetty. But it would have seemed like disapproval also, and I do not mean that. Only that it is hard to be the first to break society’s rules (especially while Mr and Mrs Burlington Brown are the arbiters of its moral and social register!) and I know that he will find it difficult, even here.

Or – perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps this country will teach other ways, just as it is teaching me. This is the country where I became free. And perhaps, in another way, Hetty (and Edward) feel the same.

When Edward and I and Lucy and Quintus rode over the hills here to the Wairarapa; when we saw the flat, fertile land stretching out before us from the bridle path at the top of the hill, down there beside the shining lake, I believe Edward nearly wept in relief. Everybody wanted to be seen to be doing their utmost for the nephew of the recently deceased Sir Charles Cooper, MP: the New Zealand Company assured him that they owned the acreage involved and so Edward would travel no further. (Recently we have found that the intricacies of the land purchase from the natives are unclear but Edward is too involved now to back out. He paid the New Zealand Company: that is certain and documented; he has acted always in good faith and we hope that all will be well.) So Lucy and Quintus and I stayed in the tiny settlement at the bottom of the hill and Edward went back to collect his belongings, of which – it soon became clear – Hetty Green was now part. (She still wore the cricket bat on her arm; it did its unlikely work well and now Hetty uses it for banging stakes into the ground or chasing the sheep, for Edward has one hundred and fifty sheep which I am proud to say I assisted him to purchase.)

The first winter in particular was very hard and our pioneering life was no longer a romance (as perhaps I had seen it at first). I of course did not understand that just the business of living, and being, is such hard work if other people are not doing much of it for you. We have had many terrifying experiences also and I have been frightened, but I do not find rats or wild pigs as frightening as the things that frightened me earlier in my life, nor the appearance late one night of an escaped convict from Australia, nor the odd comings and goings of the – sometimes immensely kind, sometimes undependable – natives, nor the rumbling sound in the distance that heralds another earthquake. But although I often wished that I was warm, or dry, or comfortable, or that my arms and my legs would not ache so, or in particular that there was time to read, or simply to think – never once did I wish I was back in Bryanston Square. But there have been three women in our little family, and no children, which is quite different from most families. Two women in this tiny settlement have died in childbirth. For women with children, and having more children, life is often difficult and dangerous and heartbreaking. (But I see, too, that Hetty faces her future with joy: some small boy will play cricket with that cricket bat.)

We lived much at first under tarpaulin; it was colder than we expected and it rained a great deal and Edward had immense trouble trying to build another house because the weather was so unpredictable. But he employed a gang of natives to help and then Benjamin Kingdom appeared on his way to look northwards for his elusive bird and turned out to be a most practical man (for an ornithologist). He is also extremely erudite and taught me many things in the time he was here: I found myself discussing the strangest matters with him – rocks of course, and birds, but also telescopes, and Latin, and balance (we were on the roof trying to unblock Edward’s chimney), and God, and Henry VIII, and shoes!

In our new house Lucy can cook and sing at the same time, Hetty seems to be able to do anything at all, Quintus chases rats for all the world as if he were in Bryanston Square, and I attempt daily all the things that other people once did for me. I have, for instance, learned to hang the clothes I have washed with my own hands outside to dry in the fresh air, even undergarments, without so much as a blush to my cheek.

Lucy wishes to go back to Wellington to work in one of the hotels, where she will meet (she is quite certain of this and so am I!) a hard-working husband. Although she has not said so I think the marriage of Edward and Hetty has disturbed her also, disturbed old certainties that have sustained her. She would be too polite to say so but she does not really approve of me doing the washing, for instance, it makes her own role unclear and she does not like that. I encourage her to make her own life, of course, for I am constantly aware that it is
because
our roles are less strictly defined that we both have the chance to grow. But I shall miss her abrupt kindness more than I can say. And her singing! I woke this morning to hear her high clear voice echoing back from the fields, she sang that she would be seventeen come Sunday, and indeed she soon will be sixteen at least! There are many things unsaid between us. It still moves me (and makes me laugh at the same time) to think of her bringing Quintus to New Zealand. And in a way she saved my life, but she does not know that.

It is now two years since the Amaryllis left the English coast at last. Sometime I will have to go back to England to, as they say, sort out my affairs. For ironies abound (I sometimes see Mary’s face still, that quizzical smile). I have received letters advising me that my father left me a great deal of money ‘if she is living with me at my death and has not married’ and there we were, as the Lieutenant-Governor no doubt advised the lawyers and as it says in the hotel register, living at Barratt’s Hotel, Wellington. Of course I expected him to leave me to the care and charity of my brothers. But my father no doubt thought that I should have, unmarried, served him well before he died.

It feels so odd to think of England, and that life. Asobel writes of a huge exhibition in Hyde Park which is inside, so she says, ‘a palace made from glass and there were exhibits from New Zealand which I studied, Harriet, to learn as much as possible, until I should come’.

Whatever happens I will return here. I want to live here. I feel there is a better chance here for women to have some sort of say in their lives, if they wish it. But there is something else. I have changed a great deal, I no longer have to look about for my safety in the way that I did. And like my sister Mary I now find that it is not enough just to
be
, I want so much more than that, even though I will never have to worry about money again.

It is almost a new year, with new hopes: 1852! I want a new life and I want my life to be useful. Oh – I feel like Mary felt, there is so much for me to
learn
: to read, to understand. I know I am still in great want of education and I am so, so hungry to be taught. I suppose I, too, am now too old for the Ladies’ College in Harley Street, in a few months I will turn twenty! But I have written to Mr Dawson in his Book Emporium and he will advise me. And then, when I have at last been properly, truly educated, and opened my mind, I might be useful, somehow, in this new land.

My thoughts about what I might eventually do are so unthinkable (even to me) that I hardly dare write them down: yet I believe in them. It was true what my father said: he owned us, my mother and my sister and me. He owned us because we were prevented from being educated and owning ourselves. So we were owned by my father and only a quirk of fate has prevented me now from being passed on to, and being owned by, my brothers. There is much agitation here for self-government, and for working men as well as gentlemen to be given the vote. And what I have been considering is this: why should not
women,
whose lives here are not easy, but without whom good men like Edward could not survive,
be given the vote also
? Why should they not, without having to get permission from a father or a brother or a husband, make decisions for themselves, own property themselves, earn money for themselves?
Why not?

These are heady thoughts indeed, but surely I cannot be the only woman in the world who is thinking them?

Benjamin Kingdom makes me laugh. For some reason I trust him, even though I realise he knows very much about me. He has a very droll view of the world, rather as my sister Mary did. And the more I laugh, the more I remember laughing with Mary when I was younger, before things changed. I feel almost as though I have at last become – myself: my mother’s daughter. (I am aware that I show great want of character in writing about myself so portentously in this way but my life has changed so much that I feel I need to try and make sense of it all. I mean only to say that fear prevented me, earlier, from growing. One cannot grow if one is frightened. I shall however desist from such portentousness from now on!)

Benjamin told us he has had mail to say that Lord Ralph Kingdom has become engaged to a young girl of sixteen, a distant relation of the old Duke of Wellington, and that Lady Kingdom is ecstatic at the match. The boy George has been sent to Eton, sometimes Lucy and I speak of him, and wonder how he will fare. I could not help being delighted with the news of Peters and I hope the Lord, who knoweth all things, will forgive me for such unkindness and lack of charity. He was bitten by a poisonous snake in Sydney.