Amber

by Deborah Challinor

  ‘Very wise,’ Mrs Fleming agreed.

  Kitty followed her into the dimness of the hall while Simon waited outside.

  The house itself was quite large; Kitty counted two bedrooms on the left of the central hallway, and a parlour and a large indoor kitchen on the right. The hall floor was lined with well-swept oilcloth and the wallboards were painted a fresh white. A steep, narrow staircase in a small foyer at the back of the house led up to two attic bedrooms.

  ‘The view is very nice, isn’t it?’ Kitty said as she stood before a dormer window facing out over the Waitemata. From here she could see right across the harbour to the blue-green hills on the other side, and a collection of small and large ships at anchor.

  The room wasn’t very big, but it was pleasantly if rather plainly furnished with a chest of drawers, a wardrobe (goodness only knew how Mrs Fleming had got it up here), a ladder-backed chair and an iron bedstead. The unpainted walls were beginning to silver, and the floorboards were bare except for a bright rag rug. A flower-decorated bowl and ewer sat on the drawers, and the bed was covered with a pale yellow quilt. Most importantly, the room was indeed very clean.

  Kitty opened her purse and counted out nine guineas into Mrs Fleming’s hand. ‘I’m not sure how long I’ll be staying,’ she said, very glad that Simon was downstairs. ‘Not for any great length of time, but probably for at least three weeks.’

  ‘And then will you be rejoining your husband?’ Mrs Fleming asked, her face alight with both interest and curiosity. ‘That’s very brave of you.’

  ‘Well, we’ll see,’ Kitty said.

  Downstairs again, she asked Simon to carry her trunk up to her room, then waited in the parlour with Mrs Fleming until he came down again.

  ‘How many other boarders do you have here?’ she asked.

  Mrs Fleming fussed about, moving a brass candlestick from one side of the mantelpiece to the other. Like the room upstairs, the parlour was simply but attractively furnished. ‘I have two other ladies, so three now, counting your good self.’

  ‘And where are these ladies this morning?’ Kitty asked.

  ‘Oh, they both have employment. One works for Mr Gorrie, the confectioner in High Street, and the other works for Mr Demmell, the watchmaker in Queen Street. Miss Whelan—she’s the one who works for Mr Gorrie—occasionally brings home little bags of left-over butterscotch toffee, and very delicious it is too.’

  ‘Does the other one bring home left-over watch springs?’ Kitty asked.

  Mrs Fleming looked at her blankly. ‘Miss Langford? No.’

  Oh dear, Kitty thought, no sense of humour.

  ‘Miss Whelan arrived last year,’ Mrs Fleming mithered on, ‘and she’s affianced already, to a very nice young man named Mr Crow. He’s a butcher at Flourday’s Fine Meats on Chancery Street. Miss Langford, however, came out on the Duchess of Argyle, and she’s been here for almost two-and-a-half years and still hasn’t found herself a husband. I keep suggesting she try her luck at Port Nicholson, but no, she says she’s very happy here.’ She moved the candlestick back to its original position. ‘How that can be when she remains a spinster I’m not sure, but still, each to her own, I suppose.’

  Kitty quite liked the sound of Miss Langford. ‘And when did you come to Auckland, Mrs Fleming?’

  ‘Oh, I arrived on the Anna Watson in September of 1840. One of the first fleet, you know.’

  ‘Really? And what does your husband do?’

  Mrs Fleming sat down abruptly. ‘Sadly, Mr Fleming passed away six months after we arrived.’

  Kitty regretted asking now. ‘Oh, I am sorry.’

  ‘He was a printer. Fortunately he left me enough to purchase this house, and I’ve been taking in boarders ever since.’

  At the parlour door, Simon cleared his throat.

  Mrs Fleming bounced to her feet again. ‘Oh dear, we’re not keeping you from the business of saving souls, are we?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Simon replied. ‘Mrs Farrell, may I have a private word, if you please?’

  Kitty rose while Mrs Fleming extended her hand to Simon. ‘Well, it’s been lovely to meet you, Mr Bullock. I hope that we may meet again.’

  Simon clasped her hand and responded in kind. Outside, on the verandah that ran along the front of the house, he remarked, ‘Well, it seems comfortable enough. Except for your landlady’s incessant talking.’

  Kitty shrugged. ‘I expect she’s just lonely. Apparently there are two other boarders—a Miss Whelan and a Miss Langford. Miss Whelan is engaged to be married but Miss Langford apparently is a spinster.’

  Simon caught her eye. ‘Well, don’t look at me—I’m not in the market for a wife. Still.’

  Kitty laid a hand on his arm and said with only a little bit of embarrassment, ‘I do know that, Simon.’

  Simon stared down at his boots for a long moment, then, with obvious difficulty, met her gaze again. A mottled flush spread up his neck. ‘But do you know why?’

  Her heart aching for him, Kitty said gently, ‘Yes, I do. Rian told me.’ And she gave him an affectionate kiss on his cheek, which made him go even more red. ‘He guessed. I gather he was right?’

  Simon nodded and stammered, ‘You don’t mind? It doesn’t make you…?’

  Almost angrily, Kitty tugged on the lapel of his jacket. ‘Of course I don’t mind! Why should I? It’s your business, Simon, no one else’s, and it makes no difference to me. You are what you are and I’m very fond of you, so there.’

  ‘I tried to tell you, that day on the beach at Paihia, when you thought I was going to propose, I really did.’

  Kitty almost blushed herself at the memory of it. ‘Yes, well, we were rather at cross-purposes, weren’t we?’

  ‘Oh God,’ Simon groaned. ‘I suppose the entire crew of the Katipo know, do they?’

  ‘I doubt it. At least, Rian wouldn’t have said anything to them. He’s very fond of you as well, you know. And he trusts you implicitly.’

  ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he? I’m hardly likely to run off with you, am I?’

  ‘No, not just with me, with everything. He thinks you have a very balanced view of the world—well, for a missionary—and that your decisions are always very sound.’

  That cheered Simon up. ‘Does he really?’

  ‘Yes, he does. So, what are you going to do now?’

  ‘I thought I’d go back to the Commercial and book a room. What will you do for supper?’

  ‘I might stay in and meet my fellow boarders. Unless you wanted to dine?’

  ‘No, I feel like an early night, actually. Shall we meet in the morning? We could go exploring.’

  Kitty smiled. ‘Yes, I think I’d like that, Simon. I’ll see you then.’

  When Kitty went back upstairs to her new room, she leaned on the windowsill and briefly closed her eyes. She missed Rian dreadfully already, and had no idea how she would manage even a week without seeing him, never mind three or four. And what if the trouble up north turned into a real war, one that went on for months and months?

  She sighed and turned away, eyeing her trunk sitting neatly in the corner where Simon had left it. It really needed to be unpacked. She had brought two extra day dresses with her, underthings, her nightgowns and an extra bonnet, which would no doubt be well and truly squashed by now.

  She knelt down and wrestled with the latches on the trunk; they were stiff and slightly rusty from the sea air, but eventually they opened with a short screech of protest. Setting her palms at the front corners of the lid she pushed it up and, with a small cry of disgust, lurched sharply back from the smell. It was appalling, and she recognised it immediately—cat shit.

  The cat herself uncurled from her nest inside Kitty’s bonnet.

  ‘Bodie!’ Kitty exclaimed, her hand over her nose.

  Bodie blinked, stretched and creakily got to her feet.

  Kitty lifted her out, noting with extreme distaste that the cat had emptied her bowels at least twice, and set her on the floor. ‘You could hav
e suffocated in there!’

  Bodie gave the feline equivalent of a shrug, then sat down and began to clean her bottom.

  Kitty gazed at her soiled belongings in despair, then gingerly began to unpack the trunk. Everything in it stank, but only one of her petticoats and her spare chemise had cat mess on them. At least Bodie had been tidy. Carefully, she lifted the offending items out and set them aside.

  ‘How on earth did you get in my trunk?’ she muttered. But she knew—it must have been when she’d left it open on her bed at Aunt Sarah’s after she’d finished packing. ‘I bet you’re hungry,’ she added, then started to laugh helplessly.

  Still giggling, she poured water from the ewer into the bowl and set it on the floor; Bodie immediately rushed over to it and began to drink greedily.

  ‘I don’t have anything for you to eat, you know,’ Kitty said.

  Bodie’s ears flicked back in response as she continued to lap up the water.

  Kitty wondered if she could ask Mrs Fleming for something. But then she remembered her comment about not being able to abide cats, and her heart sank. ‘Oh dear, what am I going to do with you?’

  But she could quite legitimately say that she was hungry.

  She found her landlady in the laundry off the back porch. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Fleming,’ she said, ‘but could I bother you for something to eat? There weren’t enough rations on the Victoria to feed us all this morning.’

  Mrs Fleming, her face red and sweaty from working over the copper, thought about it for a moment. ‘Well, your board only covers breakfast. I’m more than happy to cook supper for you for an additional fee—I charge a shilling per meal—but given that you’ve paid for the whole day today, I’ll provide your dinner and we’ll call it breakfast, shall we?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, that would be lovely, thank you,’ Kitty replied.

  ‘It will just be some sort of cold collation. Will that suffice?’

  ‘Wonderful, thank you.’ Kitty eyed the boiling copper. ‘And I would very much appreciate using your laundry facilities. I seem to have had a small spillage in my trunk.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Mrs Fleming said, wiping a trickle of sweat from her brow with the back of her wrist. ‘I ask all my boarders to do their own laundry. I run a boarding house, after all, not a hotel. I’ll call you when I’ve prepared your meal.’

  Kitty went back upstairs and finished unpacking her trunk. Everything would have to be washed, except for her dresses—they were too delicate to go into the copper and anyway would take days to dry, so she would have to make do with airing them and perhaps liberally sprinkling them with rose water. Hanging out of the window, she vigorously flapped the petticoat and chemise to get rid of the hardened cat shit, then inspected her bonnet. It was squashed and lined with a layer of black fur, but salvageable.

  ‘You really are a naughty cat, you know,’ Kitty grumbled.

  Bodie, stretched out on the yellow quilt, said, Mrrrp.

  Kitty brought her meal back to her room. Bodie gobbled the cheese and a slice of ham and licked the butter off a piece of bread, then returned to the quilt where she sat contentedly washing herself. Kitty finished off what Bodie hadn’t wanted—she had suspected that cats wouldn’t like persimmon chutney on crackers—then collected up her things to take downstairs to the laundry, fervently hoping that Mrs Fleming wouldn’t notice the smell.

  Miss Langford and Miss Whelan arrived home within ten minutes of each other, just after six o’clock, surprising Kitty because they were both the complete opposite of what she had imagined they would be.

  Hattie Whelan was chubby with a plain face, brown hair and eyes, and crooked teeth, which she showed frequently because she smiled and laughed a lot. Flora Langford, whom Kitty had expected to be the plain one as she hadn’t managed to find herself a husband, had the potential to be very pretty, were she to make the effort. She had dark gold hair pulled back in a severe bun, blue eyes that tilted up at the outer corners hidden behind rather thick spectacles, and a prettily shaped mouth.

  They both wanted to know all about Kitty, what her husband did, what it was like sailing around the world on a schooner, and what had happened at Kororareka.

  ‘Were you frightened? I would have been,’ Hattie said, helping herself to a third piece of bread. ‘I would have been terrified.’

  ‘It was frightening at times,’ Kitty agreed, recalling the long hours she’d spent in the cave wondering whether she would ever get out again, or if she was going to end up a pile of bones inside the rotting tatters of her clothes like Uncle George.

  Mrs Fleming, who seemed to have an insatiable appetite for the details of what had happened at Kororareka, asked, ‘And did you stay inside Polack’s Stockade the whole time? It blew up, didn’t it? I heard dozens of people perished in the explosion.’

  ‘Actually, I believe only two people died. And no, I should have stayed inside the stockade but I…well, I panicked at the sound of the guns and ran outside.’

  Hattie gasped. ‘My Lord, not right into the middle of the fighting?’

  ‘No, I ran around the back of the stockade and took shelter in a house there,’ Kitty lied. ‘I didn’t come out until the order came to evacuate.’

  Hattie shuddered. ‘I would have been absolutely petrified hiding in a little house all by myself. Arthur, my intended—’ she said, interrupting herself and holding out her hand for Kitty to view the ring on her finger.

  Kitty saw that it was a ‘dearest’ ring—the first letter of the name of each coloured gemstone spelled out the word—and looked rather expensive, especially for a butcher. ‘Very nice,’ she said.

  ‘He sent to Sydney for it,’ Hattie explained proudly. ‘Anyway, Arthur said the fighting was all over in a matter of hours. Is that true?’

  ‘I suppose it was,’ Kitty agreed. ‘Although it seemed a lot longer.’

  ‘And what did your dashing husband do, Mrs Farrell?’ Mrs Fleming asked. ‘I expect he was right at the forefront of the fighting?’

  ‘No, he moved around a lot. I believe he was at the lower blockhouse for a while, then behind the town.’

  ‘That was the way the Kapiti Maoris crept up, wasn’t it? That’s what I heard,’ Mrs Fleming said, attacking a piece of particularly tough gristle with her knife.

  ‘Te Kapotai, from Waikare,’ Kitty corrected.

  Flora Langford set her knife and fork neatly across her plate and dabbed at her mouth with a table napkin. ‘And is it true that fifty imperial troops died and more than two hundred rebel Maoris?’

  ‘I don’t know about the Maoris,’ Kitty replied, ‘but the last I heard, on the morning after the battle, Bishop Selwyn buried nineteen British soldiers and marines. Some at Kororareka and some in the churchyard at Paihia.’

  ‘It seems a bit silly to me,’ Flora said. ‘All that fuss over a flagpole.’

  Mrs Fleming looked up, aghast. ‘It’s not just any flagpole, Miss Langford. A flagpole flying the Union Jack, the symbol of everything that is British and good!’

  ‘Well, I suppose that could be considered vaguely insulting,’ Flora conceded.

  ‘Vaguely? Vaguely!’ Mrs Fleming evidently couldn’t believe her ears. ‘Why, it…it was a blatant slap in the Queen’s face, that’s what it was!’

  The conversation lapsed after that. As Mrs Fleming cleared the table, Kitty asked, ‘Is there a good pharmacy here? I forgot to bring shampoo.’

  Flora said, ‘There’s only Mr McKenzie, on Shortland Street. But he stocks most things, and he manufactures. You can borrow mine if you need some tonight. I’ll bring it to your room.’

  Flora was as good as her word, although Kitty had to hurriedly stuff Bodie into the wardrobe when she knocked on the door.

  ‘Come in, please,’ Kitty said as she opened it.

  Flora handed her a jar of shampoo, walked in and sat down on the chair. ‘This room is quite nice, isn’t it? Mine’s a bit dark in the mornings, but this one was taken when I moved in.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘What’s that
smell?’

  Kitty sniffed. ‘I can’t smell anything.’ She couldn’t, either; she had washed everything this afternoon and thoroughly scrubbed the inside of her trunk.

  ‘Sort of an itchy smell,’ Flora said, then sneezed incredibly loudly.

  Kitty waited while Flora made the face that people do when they’re not sure whether they’re going to sneeze again, and then she did, four more times in quick succession.

  ‘You’ve got a cat in here, haven’t you?’ she said, looking around suspiciously.

  ‘No,’ Kitty lied.

  ‘Yes you have. Cats are the only thing that make me sneeze like that. Even just a few hairs will do it.’

  Just then Bodie scratched violently on the inside of the wardrobe door. Kitty rolled her eyes in frustration and let her out. Bodie jumped onto the floor, walked up to Flora and hissed unpleasantly.

  ‘I knew it,’ Flora said, dabbing at her nose with her handkerchief. ‘Mrs Fleming doesn’t allow pets. Especially cats. She hates cats.’

  ‘I know,’ Kitty replied, and sat down on the bed. ‘I didn’t mean to bring her. She stowed away in my trunk.’

  Flora laughed. ‘What a clever cat you are,’ she said to Bodie.

  Bodie hissed again, then yawned.

  ‘Did she shit in it, too?’ Flora asked.

  Kitty blinked at the crude word; she’d heard it thousands of times from the crew, but hadn’t at all expected it to come out of Flora’s pretty mouth. ‘Er, yes, she did actually. Well, she was shut in it for two days.’

  Flora made another face, this one expressing distaste. ‘You’ll have to smuggle her out to do her business, or your room will reek like a zoo. Lucky Mrs Fleming is as blind as a bat. Unfortunately, she has a nose as good as the one on your cat. What’s her name?’

  ‘My cat?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Bodie, short for Boadicea.’

  ‘How do you do, Boadicea,’ Flora said, and sneezed again.

  Chapter Ten