by Sarah Lark
“And New Zealand?” Lizzie asked hoarsely.
Mr. Smithers laughed. “You can’t quite swim there either. But it’s only two thousand four hundred miles. There’s even a ship from Hobart. But I’m warning you, kitten, the sea is stormy. And what would you and Cecil do there? Hunt whales? Seals? Cecil wouldn’t hurt a fly. And there are no jobs for house kittens like you either. Unless they’re as bawdy as you.” He embraced her and let his hands wander over her breasts. “You’d find plenty of customers on the West Coast.”
“Have you been there before, sir?” Lizzie asked, fighting back her disgust.
“No, but it might be that we’ll move there when the work here is done,” Mr. Smithers said, seeming rather disinterested. “They’re building a new city on the East Coast. There’ll be work for me there. David Parsley is looking into it soon.” David Parsley was Mr. Smithers’s assistant, a young engineer whom he regarded highly. “If you’re a good little kitty, we’ll take you and Cecil with us.”
Martin Smithers covered Lizzie’s neck with more wet kisses.
Traveling with him and Cecil to New Zealand was really the last thing Lizzie envisioned. Even if a new city sounded rather enticing, whenever something new came into being, everything went topsy-turvy. But there did not seem to be convicts in New Zealand, so surely there would be no soldiers there to look for escapees.
“So, what exactly is your plan for New Zealand?” Lizzie asked Michael when she saw him the following Sunday. The chain gang was still working nearby. Lizzie had feigned a headache to get away from Cecil and seek out the men once more. “There’s no sea anywhere near here.”
“We’re not free yet either,” said Dylan. “It’ll still be a few months until they take off our chains, and then we’ll be in Launceston.”
“Then we’ll be in Hobart,” Michael corrected him optimistically. “We’ll break out, steal a ship . . .”
“What kind of ship?” asked Lizzie.
“A sailboat. It’s a little too far to row, right, Connor?”
Connor nodded. “What I have in mind,” he mused weightily, “is a sleek, little sailboat.”
“We’ll make it,” Will added, sounding less convinced.
So, a glorified raft. Lizzie thought with horror about the wide sea and the storms Mr. Smithers had mentioned.
“Have any of you ever sailed before? I mean, aside from Connor?” she asked the men.
Michael, Dylan, and Will shook their heads.
“But you pick it up quick,” Connor insisted.
Lizzie could not help herself: she began to doubt even Connor’s experience on oceangoing ships. Probably, he had only sailed to sea as a cabin boy. He could not be much older than eighteen or nineteen. In her opinion, their plan was bound to fail. The escapees could count themselves lucky if they were caught in Hobart Harbor. They might otherwise pay for their nonsense with death at sea.
In any case, Lizzie did not want Michael exposed to the hazard. Let alone herself. And then there was the fact that she could not wait for some blind agent of the Crown to commit the foolishness of removing Dylan’s and Will’s chains. Lizzie would have left those two in the chain gang until they were old and gray. It would have to be different.
That evening, she tried to picture herself in better places while she stoically lay under Martin Smithers’s sweaty, thrusting body.
Lizzie developed a plan.
Chapter 10
After Claire Edmunds’s visit, Kathleen’s silent brooding, resignation, and surrender to loneliness gave way to a liveliness she had not felt of late. Was it possible she had found a friend? Was it possible they would visit each other regularly, be present for each other’s births, and talk easily with each other as she had with her neighbors back in Ireland and during her first months in Port Cooper?
Kathleen was going to wash the teacups Claire and she had drunk from, but she wanted the proof that Claire had been there. She had not imagined Claire, and she was not on her way to going mad. Kathleen tucked Claire’s teacup in a cabinet as a keepsake. The next day she would return the visit. If Claire’s house was also along the Avon, there had to be a faster way to get there than taking the road to Christchurch.
The next day she tended to only her most necessary duties before setting her boys on the calmest and surest mule Ian had in the stables and climbing up behind the two of them. They got on their way quickly, but it soon became difficult to make her way through the reedy, tall grass and the low-hanging branches of the trees on the banks. Kathleen dismounted and led the mule, but she was not discouraged. If she went along the banks a few times, a path would form on its own. The banks were overgrown but passable.
And indeed, Kathleen’s effort paid off. It took her an hour—so only about three miles lay between the Coltranes’ farm and Stratford Manor. The Edmunds’ estate didn’t awe her as much as she had imagined it would. Despite its lovely-sounding name, it was no manor, just a meager cottage hammered together out of boards, quite similar to her own but in worse shape.
Kathleen remembered Ian cursing in frustration when they had taken ownership of the farm. He had spent the first few weeks on repairs alone, until he had fixed the house and stables well enough that the wind would no longer blow through the cracks in the wall and the roof kept out the rain.
Claire’s husband took his boat toward Christchurch every day to ferry people and their households up the Avon from the sea to their new town. From his farm, this was laborious and time consuming. So far, at least, he had not had the time or the money to weatherproof or even repaint the house. The old paint, a matte yellow, had long since begun peeling off, which made the house look even more dilapidated. And the fences to the paddocks—in which the donkey, Spotty; a fat cow and its newborn calf; and a few sheep meandered—did not look very sturdy. Though plenty of grass was growing there now, once that was eaten, the animals would wander elsewhere for sustenance, and Claire would have to go off looking for them just as Kathleen did with their livestock.
Kathleen took her children off the mule, tying it as securely as possible to the most trustworthy-looking fencepost, and they crossed a ramshackle porch to the front door. When she knocked, Claire opened the door lightning fast—clearly she was just as eager for company as Kathleen herself. Today, however, she had not dressed finely. Her dark hair was carelessly put up, and she wore an old housedress that stretched over her stomach just like the riding dress. Why didn’t she just let the clothes out a bit?
Claire’s whole face beamed when she saw Kathleen and the children. She immediately wrapped her arms around her new friend.
“How lovely you’ve come,” she said. “Come in; I’m brewing tea. You can also have some of the stew I’m making, but I’m afraid it’s not very good.”
Kathleen refrained from trying the sweet potatoes, which were indeed completely overcooked.
“It’s best to peel them first,” she said when she looked in the pot.
“But the skin falls off by itself if you cook them long enough, and then . . .”
“But then they’re mushy, and you get dirt in your cooking water—or do you clean the skin thoroughly beforehand? If you want to make a stew, you need to peel them and cut them into little chunks. And I’d add something more than the sweet potatoes and that piece of meat. What is that anyway? In any case, you can’t cook it long enough for the fiber to come off the bone. I’d cut the meat off now. Do you have any onions or proper potatoes? It looks like there’s a garden around the side of the house.”
Claire was astonished. She had not planted the garden herself; that must have been the wife of the farm’s previous owner. And she had no idea anything edible grew there. Her efforts were limited to planting a few young rata bushes.
“They’re quite lovely, don’t you think?” she said excitedly, pointing at the red blossoms.
Kathleen nodded. “Yes, but you can’t eat them.” For the tenants in Ireland, the yield of their small gardens was necessary for survival. No one would have
planted trees for the sake of decoration. “Here, look: potatoes and carrots. And herbs. You can use all of these.”
Claire reacted joyfully to every dug-up tuber as if it were an uncovered treasure.
Back in the kitchen, Kathleen set to work to save the stew. Together she and Claire chopped up the sweet potatoes and other vegetables from the completely overgrown garden. Claire handled the knife so clumsily that Kathleen feared she might cut herself. Kathleen put all of the vegetables in the pot along with the meat she had removed from the bones.
“Didn’t you have a garden at home?” Kathleen asked once the pot was back on the fire.
“Sure,” Claire said, “and a gardener too. The most my mother did was tend to the roses. And we girls made garlands.”
Claire had worked hard to beautify her cottage. The rata bush blossoms, as well as shining green pohutukawa and yellow blooming kowhai branches, stood in handsome porcelain vases on the floor. Decorations aside, the furnishings were humble. The Edmundses possessed even less, and considerably more decrepit, furniture than Kathleen and Ian. Their three-legged table was, however, covered with a beautiful linen tablecloth, and Claire now set filigreed porcelain dishes upon it. Fascinated, Sean fingered one of the paper-thin teacups; Kathleen took it warily out of his hand before he broke it.
“Oh, that wouldn’t be the worst thing. A few already broke on the way over,” Claire said, at ease. “I have sets for twelve people. That many people don’t even live in this whole county.”
Kathleen had to laugh. The house and its contents were just as much at odds as her new friend who could not cook a simple stew but served tea with skilled hands and elegant motions. It all reminded Kathleen of Lady Wetherby, who had taught her maids herself how to prepare and serve this most English of drinks. Was that all English girls learned of housekeeping?
Claire freely admitted this when Kathleen dared to ask it aloud. “Yes,” she said. “Rather. Though, of course, I do also know how to set the table for meals with several courses and the like. And how one suitably places the guests—for example, when one has a bishop and a general as guests at the same time. But that isn’t much use here. Just as little as the tableware.” She looked regretfully at her treasure of Chinese porcelain.
“Why did you bring it then?” Kathleen asked. No one could think so impractically, and Claire did show a settler’s spirit.
Claire frowned. “My mother sent it to me. I told you that I wrote to my family in London after the wedding. My father wanted nothing more to do with me, but my mother sent me a trousseau. It would break her heart if I went abroad so completely without means, she wrote.”
“But there would have been other things she could have sent,” said Kathleen, thinking of pots, fabric—or simply money.
Claire smiled understandingly at her new friend. “I thought so too. My violin, for instance. Or a few books, notes, a dictionary. I have no idea how I’m supposed to raise my child. How am I supposed to teach him anything when we don’t even have a dictionary?”
Kathleen sighed. Claire’s situation was obviously worse than she had feared. Claire was highly educated and cultured, but she possessed none of the skills that were natural for Kathleen and necessary for survival in this country. She could not sew, nor had she practiced using a broom or scouring brush.
“When our maid back home cleaned the floors, they got clean,” the young woman explained helplessly. “When I do it, everything is just wet.”
Nevertheless, Claire had not let her failings discourage her. She was diligent and tried everything, having had the most success with stable work. Her charm and her friendly manner also worked on the animals. So she was able to add fresh milk to the tea. Claire reported, not without humor, that she had dubbed the cow Minerva and reached a sort of “lady’s agreement” with her. If she fed the animal and sang to it, it would hold still for milking.
“And then last night she had a calf,” Claire reported enthusiastically of her latest adventure. “It came out her rear.” She blushed. “You were right that, hm, it stretches. Is it like that for us too?” She felt her belly.
Kathleen nodded.
“We had to pull, though, Matt and I. It was difficult. And are human children also so, so slippery?” Claire kept chattering on pleasantly. “Well, anyway, there the calf is, and its mother ought not to be called Minerva, since she was a virgin.”
“The cow was still a heifer?” Kathleen interrupted her, confused. “I thought Ian sold her to you pregnant. She was giving milk, after all.”
Claire’s eyes grew wide. “You knew she was pregnant?”
Over the next hour, Claire learned that cows only gave milk when they were pregnant or had delivered a calf. And, transfixed, little Sean listened to the story of the goddess Minerva who sprang from her father’s head and never took a spouse.
“Although she really missed out there,” Claire said, sounding very convinced.
Kathleen would not have signed onto that statement without reservations. She had long since begun to question her marriage to Ian. Would she someday trust Claire Edmunds enough to talk about it?
On this day, too, Kathleen was reluctant to part from her strange but exceedingly engaging new friend. But she expected Ian back from a trip that night, and she did not want him to find the house empty. Claire generously gave her half of the vegetables they had dug up from the garden. Kathleen’s garden had yet to yield any produce.
“Then you can cook your husband stew too,” Claire said. “Matt will certainly be astonished when he returns later.” The aroma of the finished stew wafted from her kitchen. “And next time, you can bring me yeast, or whatever one calls it.”
Claire’s efforts at bread baking had so far limited themselves to the mixing of roughly ground grain with water. The result was inedible, hard-as-bone unleavened bread. Kathleen had told her about the existence of leavening that afternoon.
Kathleen was happy for Claire’s friendship, but Ian Coltrane did not prove as enthusiastic about his wife’s new acquaintance. Kathleen would not have told him anything about Claire at first. Since Ian so readily misconstrued her remarks as attacks and harmless stories as confessions of infidelity, she had become exceedingly careful, only telling her husband what was necessary.
But Sean blurted out the news as soon as Ian came home. He mocked—as well as he could at his age—Mrs. Edmunds’s strange saddle.
“’potty, ’potty,” Colin squealed, laughing.
“Are they talking about that upper-crust bitch and her donkey?” Ian asked.
Kathleen explained the children’s comments and told him where Claire’s residence was.
“With the sailor husband trying his hand as a ferryman?” asked Ian. “He’s not getting anywhere. And that woman—I have to warn you, Kathleen, the respectable women in Christchurch won’t talk to her.”
So that was why Claire had feared Kathleen might rebuff her.
“Why not?” Kathleen inquired. “Granted, she’s a bit strange. But quite friendly and open.”
“She’s stuck-up, is what she is,” Ian said. “And forward. The woman at the dry goods store in Christchurch says she asked such inappropriate questions that she blushed like a schoolgirl. And what’s more, she’s slovenly. Even her husband says so. All the women feel sorry for him, the way he runs around. She can’t patch his clothes, can’t cook. And their house—I’ve seen it myself, Kathie. A real shame. I don’t think it’s right for you to associate with her.”
Kathleen shrugged her shoulders. “Well, the fine ladies of Christchurch won’t know about it anyway. Although I find it interesting how much of their gossip you hear. But no matter what the whole world says about Claire Edmunds, I’m having a baby soon. And the only woman within ten miles is Mrs. Edmunds. She’s promised to stay with me and—”
“Her?” Ian laughed. “She still believes storks bring babies. I’m warning you, Kathleen.”
Kathleen lowered her head. But then she continued anyway. She and Claire had not shar
ed any secrets, but contact with the lively girl had given her strength.
“That’s because no one will answer her inappropriate questions,” Kathleen said curtly. “And besides, Claire Edmunds is pregnant. Someone has to help her when the baby is born, and that will be me. It’s my Christian duty, Ian. Whether you like it or not.”
To Kathleen’s amazement, Ian did not talk to her any more about Claire Edmunds, nor did he expressly forbid contact with her. Probably, he recognized that he had no way of enforcing this.
“I’ll hear about it, Kathleen, if you make too nice with Matt Edmunds,” was all he said, standing up from the table and ordering Kathleen into the bedroom with a dark look. Kathleen followed him—but while she lay beneath him, bearing his thrusts and rough kisses, she did not think of some other man but instead of the armored, warlike goddess Minerva.
“Oh, Matthew doesn’t like that we’re friends either,” Claire said when Kathleen cautiously alluded to Ian’s opinion.
As it happened, Claire knew very well what people said about her. She had also heard a bit about Kathleen, which she now reported. “They say you don’t want to have anything to do with the parish since you’re Catholic. Irish, you’re all supposed to be Catholic. And who knows what strange observances you might have.”
“Observances?” asked Kathleen, who did not know the word.
“Customs. Something about actual blood and flesh in your services—if you asked the chandler’s wife, you’d think you all ate babies.” Claire laughed, but Kathleen was horrified.
“Seriously, Matt says I’ll have to keep an eye on the little one. But he’s just angry at that Ian of yours because of the matter with the donkey. He’s nursing a grudge. And he’ll need a mule soon—hopefully your husband won’t trick him again. Couldn’t you have a word with him?”
Kathleen shook her head regretfully. Ian did not inform her of his sales plans, but naturally, he was still cheating people. For Kathleen, the worst of it was that now he had the boys watch as he transformed an old, lame nag into a shiny young horse with a charming temper in time for a sales conversation. The children did not understand much of it yet, but they both felt very important when their father took them into the barn to explain his “craft.” If this continued, they would become swindlers before they could even speak properly.
