by Dorothy Eden
Jemima Potter didn’t talk in that crisp sardonic way. She merely looked at Briar in incredulous astonishment. “Do you mean you refused him!” And abruptly began to cry.
Briar threw her arms around the thin shaking body. “Jemima, what’s it to you whether I marry Saul Whitmore or not?”
“It’s nothing, really. Yes, it is. I was so proud for you when I heard. And then Fred—well, he’s finding it hard to get the kind of work he wants. He’s had one disappointment after another, never the sort of job he’s set his heart on. And he thought—” Jemima gazed at Briar with pleading eyes—“he thought you might persuade Mr. Whitmore to give him a job on his farm. They say he’s got such a big place, and there might have been an acre or so where Fred could grow his own potatoes. It would be so good for the children, too,” she added wistfully.
“It’s hostile Maori country,” Briar managed to say. “Wouldn’t you be afraid?”
“Not if you and Fred were there. We’d all be together.”
Briar took her hands. “Oh, Jemima, I can’t, I can’t! Don’t ask me to. I’m so muddled and unhappy, I wish I were dead. But I can’t marry Saul. I hate him!”
“Not even for a house and all those things a woman likes to have? Things that are the due of someone like you? And little Rose,” she added slyly. “Wouldn’t you like a baby like that?”
A baby with Saul Whitmore to father it! A dark tide of revulsion ran through her. She remembered his savage and hurting kiss, and pressed her hands to her face.
“Jemima, don’t ask me to!” she begged.
But what she had refused to believe did happen. Peter Fanshawe proposed to Sophia and was accepted with promptitude. Aunt Charity, immensely relieved by this one piece of good fortune, was restored to her bustling managing ways, and immediately began making elaborate plans for the wedding.
“Now, Briar,” she said, determinedly overcoming her dislike for this strange, silent, difficult girl, “you’d better be just as sensible and put that poor man out of his misery.”
For it occurred to Aunt Charity that it might be an amusing and piquant situation to have two weddings from her house, Sophia’s first, of course, and later this odd beggar-maid—King Cophetua wedding. After twenty years of marriage, some of her husband’s dry humor and philosophy seemed to have rubbed off on to her after all.
And one had to look at things in a practical way. If Briar married Saul, the Governor and his lady would receive her, so how could Aunt Charity stand by?
The next day old Mrs. Whitmore came to call again.
“I want to see this young woman my son has lost his head about,” she stated uncompromisingly.
So for the third time Briar was permitted to sit in the drawing room.
This time she stared with unconcealed hostility at the yellow-faced old woman with her long, thin, unbending body. Did this autocratic person think she could bludgeon her into marrying her precious son?
But no, she didn’t, Briar perceived with surprise. “She hates me,” she thought, “and hopes to frighten me away. She’s daring me to marry Saul. She thinks I’m not good enough. I’d like to show her.…”
The idea began to grow. Why, after all, shouldn’t she show Oriane Whitmore that she could do as well and a great deal better than any society miss? There was nothing more to lose. Peter, who would have been infinitely preferable as a husband, was Sophia’s. Being a lady’s maid all her life would be even worse than sewing for twelve hours a day with Miss Matthews. Besides it would be wonderful to make Jemima and Fred Potter happy.
Briar’s face softened at that thought, then hardened again. She returned the old woman’s gaze steadily, stare for stare, and made deliberately untrue replies to questions about her family. She believed she would marry Saul, after all, just to prove—To prove what? In her room that afternoon, with the sheet of letter paper in front of her, Briar wondered bleakly what there was worth proving.
That she could be a good wife and perhaps a mother, that she could cook and sew and manage servants, that no one would ever need to be ashamed of her.… Were those things so important?
But she would possess things. She would have beautiful silver and china, polished furniture, rugs on the floor, a garden in which grew the brilliant New Zealand rata blossoms, and English roses. She would be a person of importance. She would curtsey to the Governor.
She remembered old Mrs. Whitmore’s hostile haughty voice, “The wife of my son would need to be equal to any situation …” and bit her lip angrily and began to write,
Dear Mr. Whitmore,
I realize I have been very rude and ungrateful to you. Please forgive me, but I have not been myself, and was scarcely appreciative of the great honor you were paying me in asking me to be your wife. If you still want me—she hesitated, remembering again that outrageous kiss. Determinedly she went on—I would be happy to see you again—
Then abruptly she flung down her pen. This was cowardly, writing this humble letter. She thought of Mrs. Whitmore’s intense scathing gaze, and her jaw tightened.
If she was to do this, she would do it in person. She was not afraid to face Saul and his mother and admit she had been wrong.
Rapidly she began to put on her outdoor clothes. The sun was blazing, and the dust blowing in little eddies down the hillside. The tussocks shone silver, and the tawny toe toe plumes waved. In Aunt Charity’s garden the grass was burned dry, the roses had shed their petals, and the gum leaves crackled on the ground. Briar would like to have gone without a cloak, but she had only her working gown and her best dark gray wool, which one could not wear on such a hot day. She must wear her cloak over her working dress, and dream of the day when she would have as many gowns as Sophia and Prudence.
Looking out of the window she saw Sophia and Peter walking in the garden, his head bent attentively to hers.
Briar’s resolve stiffened. If it was not Peter’s bright head, but Saul’s dark one that bent to her like that, what of it? The loving attention was the thing.
She slipped out quietly, telling no one of her errand. She had to walk through the town, down the long street of shops and trading offices with verandahed fronts and nothing but the merest lean-to at the back. People looked at her curiously. Everyone knew of her fame, or ill-fame, by now. Her cheeks burned, she was too hot in the heavy cloak, but she continued quickly on her way. There were horses tethered outside Cooper’s public house, and a great deal of noise came from within. As she passed, a man strode out towards the big black horse tethered at the hitching rail.
He almost knocked her over, caught her arm to hold her upright, and said, “Sorry, ma’am!” Then, “Briar!”
“Saul!”
It was the first time she had called him by his name. It came to her lips spontaneously, and she saw how his dark face gleamed. But whether it were with pleasure or triumph, she could not guess. Suddenly it was impossible to tell him why she had come, impossible to think that she could marry this arrogant, insolent stranger.
“Where are you going?” he asked. “To take a glass of ale at Cooper’s?”
The angry sparkle in her eye made him chuckle. “Come now, Miss Briar. Going to a ball unescorted and unchaperoned didn’t worry you. Nothing would surprise me about you.”
“You’re making fun of me.”
“I’m admiring your practical attitude. You wanted a husband so you went out to look for one. It was just bad luck you happened to encounter someone so distasteful to you as myself.” He was walking over to his horse. “Can I escort you somewhere, or would you prefer to be without my company?”
“N-no.” Her tongue tripped over the word. How could he make this so difficult for her? And how could she tell him, standing in the dusty road watched by who knew how many eyes behind curtains, that she had made a mistake?
“Saul,” she said rapidly. “I have had second thoughts.”
His hand paused on the bridle. He turned to look at her, his eyes narrowed.
“About what?” he asked i
nfuriatingly. For he must have known what she meant. Yet he refused to help her. Was he now going to say that his offer was withdrawn?
Briar was suddenly paralyzingly afraid that this was so. And it was as if the bottom had fallen out of her life. It had been all very well to toy fastidiously with his offer, wondering how she could endure being his wife, but the thought of losing all the material things he offered because of her own sentimental foolishness made her aghast. Now it was no longer just a matter of spiting his mother. It was a matter of coming to her senses and grasping the opportunity so fortuitously offered her.
She stood very erect, looking at him levelly and willing her voice to be steady.
“I did not mean to tell you here, in the road. I was coming to call on you. I—” Would he not help her? She believed that behind his brilliant gaze he was laughing at her. “Does your offer still stand?” she finished in despair.
“Of marriage?”
“What else?” she asked icily.
“Well, now,” he said, his gaze running over her from head to foot, “am I to infer that you have fallen in love with me overnight?”
“I do not imagine you fell in love with me at the dance,” she retorted.
“On the contrary. I admired you immensely. But since then you’ve shown me clearly enough that you find me distasteful.”
“And you’re not used to being scorned,” she said involuntarily.
“Why did you scorn me last week and come to me now?”
“I have had second thoughts, as I told you.”
“And now you think it would not be too distasteful to be Mrs. Saul Whitmore?”
“I would be a good wife.” She made her voice prim. She could not now meet his hard insolent gaze.
Suddenly he burst out laughing. “You amaze me. So you will be a good wife. You will not just try. You will be so. You are certain enough of yourself to know that. Well, that remains to be seen.”
“Then it is settled?”
He laughed again at the quick eagerness in her voice. But there was no mirth in his laughter, nor was there tenderness in his eyes. He seemed to be measuring her as an opponent.
“You are a strange young woman. I think we’ll have no illusions about this. You have decided you need a husband—”
“Not just a husband, Saul Whitmore,” she had enough wit to interrupt. “You.”
He smiled crookedly. “Let’s leave the play-acting out. You need a husband, and I need a wife. I will not say I need you particularly. But it happens I want you. As a woman. So, since it’s more comfortable to observe the conventions—” His unnerving gaze held her—“my offer still stands.”
Anger at his insolence seethed within her. But she, too, had made a decision, and would not draw back.
“You are honest, anyway,” she murmured.
“More than you, I suspect. And I, at least, don’t hate you.”
“Do you imagine I hate you?”
He grinned, his face mocking. “You’ll get over it, my love.”
IX
CHARITY CARRUTHERS was certainly able to preen herself on her popularity nowadays. For everyone admired her broadminded and generous attitude towards the young nobody, the lady’s maid, Briar Johnson, who was walking off with the country’s most eligible bachelor.
There were inevitably the spiteful who said, “What else can she do? She can’t risk not being on speaking terms with someone who may one day be a countess.” But these were in the minority, and generally it was agreed that Charity, in offering to give Briar her wedding dress and a trousseau, was behaving admirably.
The wedding was planned to take place in the early autumn, for Saul had had to go back to Taranaki to attend to matters on his farm and to prepare the house for his bride.
His mother remained bitterly opposed to his choice. She was convinced that Briar was a devious, clever little upstart who had schemed to get Saul and had succeeded.
“She hasn’t even the grace to be ashamed of herself. She stared me in the face as if she’s my equal.”
“Perhaps she is,” Saul said, amused.
“What! A servant!”
“That might be Charity Carruthers speaking.”
“If you mean I’m just being snobbish, you’re wrong. I don’t trust the girl. Why is she so aggressive when one asks perfectly straightforward questions about her family? If her father is merely a working man of the lower classes, why doesn’t she say so? She has no need to be ashamed of that. I won’t despise her for it. But I won’t endure deceit.”
“She wants to be somebody, mother. One can’t blame her for ambition.”
“And you will let her use you like that! I thought you would have had more pride.”
“Perhaps I’m using her, too.”
“How can you be? Any girl would jump at the chance of marrying you. You know that. I just don’t know why you had to choose this one. I think she has you bewitched.”
Saul gave his amused, derisive laugh. “Perhaps she has. I never meant to marry her after she refused me once. But she’s got a toughness I like. The woman I take up to that wilderness has to be tough. Briar and I will do very well.”
His mother eyed him shrewdly. “I grant you she has looks. I hope you haven’t been taken in by them alone.”
Saul remembered Briar as she had been that night in her bedroom, flushed and vivid, with tumbling curls. He could have had her then, and sought later for a well-bred wife. But instinct told him that everyone else would be unendurably insipid after this fiery creature’s hostility. She had so hated being humble the other day. It was strange and intriguing that a young woman born to her circumstances had no humility. At least, she was honest in that, even though she was devious in other ways.
It would be amusing to tame her—if one wanted her tamed.
Briar herself lived through those summer days in a state of unreality from which she did not want to be awakened lest she should be too aghast at what she had done. She was glad that Saul had gone back to Taranaki, so that she need not have any more of those uneasy meetings with him until the wedding. Even the fact that to please her he had taken Fred Potter with him did not rouse her greatly, although her first opportunity to distribute largesse had been undeniably pleasant.
Jemima was full of delighted plans for the future, when they would live in one of the small cottages in the tiny township adjoining Saul’s property. Saul had told them about it. There was a church, with a minister who went long journeys on horseback to christen and bury, and a doctor who was likely to be twenty miles away when required. There was a store stocked with almost every practical requirement, from lengths of cotton print to cough mixtures, a public house, a main street which for four or five months of the year was almost impassable because of its winter mud, and a small flour mill which ground wheat for the making of bread. The rest of the handful of dwellings belonged to laborers who worked on the adjoining farms, felling trees and clearing away the interminable ferns and manuka scrub.
This small settlement was reached after a thirty-mile trip on horseback or by dray from the seaport of New Plymouth. The whole of the province was towered over by Mount Egmont, that strange isolated mountain lifting its eight-thousand-foot height out of the surrounding plain, and whose cone-shaped peak enclosed its extinct volcano.
Saul had told Briar all of this, enthusiasm lighting his face. The house at Lucknow was sparsely furnished as yet. The furniture had to be transported the thirty miles from New Plymouth by dray or bullock wagon. The piano, indeed, had been slung on poles and carried on foot by a team of friendly Maoris. The rest of the stuff they would take up on their wedding journey. It would be wise if Briar were to learn to ride a horse, as well as making her trousseau, hemming sheets and pillow-cases and nightgowns and petticoats, while he was away.
And also she had better look for a housemaid. At present the only help he had in the house was a half-caste Maori, Mabel Kingi, willing, but untrained in white ways, and with some outlandish ideas. Briar would fee
l happier with another white woman in the house. The next ship from England would bring the usual quota of immigrants. No doubt she could find someone who would be suitable.
She, so recently a maid herself, to engage one! To give orders, to be the mistress! This, at least, was real.
And Saul Whitmore, soon to be her husband, was more than real. Indeed, his dark triumphant face had a disconcerting habit of haunting her sleep and making her wake as from a nightmare.
The excited expectancy she had felt as she had sailed up the harbor in the Mary Louise only a month ago had been fulfilled, indeed, but not in the way she had hoped. She, who had thought she could be mistress of her destiny, had found that she was merely the victim of it.
At the end of that month a new ship sailed up the harbor, the Lady Sally direct from the London docks. As well as new settlers, their goods and chattels and such livestock as had survived the long voyage, some stud sheep and cattle destined for the larger sheep and cattle stations, she brought the eagerly awaited mail. There were letters from home at last. Prudence and Sophia pounced hungrily on theirs. Then Prudence suddenly gasped and went pale, and clutching a single letter to her bosom fled to her room.
Later she emerged shyly to say that of all miracles the Mary Louise and the Lady Sally had passed in mid-ocean, and exchanged letters for their separate destinations. So that months sooner than she had expected it, Prudence received a letter from Edmund.
“He still loves me,” she said raptly.
Sophia looked at her with tolerance. She could afford to be understanding now, for weren’t they all in the same position, even Briar.
“We’re all lovesick,” she said. “What a trio. But listen to what Mamma says. Everyone is well, and Sarah has a beau. Mamma hopes we’ve settled down happily, but won’t be in too great haste to marry! She’s sending us some materials and some pictures of the latest fashions, but they’ll arrive too late for my wedding. Still, who cares? Peter says he would love me in rags. Briar! Where are your letters? Didn’t you get any?”
