The Fire Blossom

by Lark, Sarah

  “Experience in agriculture and animal husbandry are the minimum prerequisites for someone who wants to start a farm,” Jane admonished. “And what about bookkeeping and management? Hiring and supervising farmhands? If it’s supposed to be such a large venture . . .”

  Christopher bit his lip. He’d spent as little time considering these details as he had thinking about the kinds of vegetables and grains that he would plant.

  “I’ll figure it out,” he replied weakly.

  Jane snorted. “Well, fortunately, I understand how to manage such things. So we won’t go hungry.”

  “Miss Jane,” Christopher said, trying again. “I don’t expect you to have to exert yourself in any way in order to ensure our survival. On the contrary, I wish from the depths of my heart to offer you the lifestyle that you desire. Maybe things will begin a little slowly, but before long, you will have a large house with domestic staff. There will soon be a town to the south of the Waimakariri estuary, and cultural offerings to follow.”

  “You don’t have to build an opera house for me right away,” Jane replied sarcastically. “But fine, you’ve made your case, and I’ll consider it. Now, excuse me, my mother is waiting for me.” She turned to her father. “We heard about the events in Wairau. The missionary—what was his name? Tate. This afternoon he’s organized a prayer meeting. The full memorial service will wait until Colonel Wakefield has pulled himself together. In any case, we have to be there. Mr. Fenroy, it was a pleasure to meet you.”

  With that, she swept out of the room.

  During the service that afternoon, Jane Beit ignored Christopher completely. A few days later, however, he received a letter in which she requested that he appear at the Beits’ house for tea. Of course he brought flowers, and almost sank into the floor with shame when Cat responded to the bell and put them in a vase. He hadn’t seen the girl since she had left with the butler. Now she was wearing the tidy servant’s uniform, and only gave Chris a discreet glance. She seemed to be about to greet him, but then bit it back. Did she not know what to say? Or was it forbidden for the servants to fraternize with their employers’ guests?

  Christopher struggled through the formal teatime small talk. Mrs. Beit asked about his family, his work, and his plans. Jane just listened. As far as he could tell, at least. Perhaps she was occupied by other thoughts. Only when Chris was bidding them farewell did she deign to speak to him.

  “The next thing we have to do is go to the church together. We’re either Lutherans or Protestants; my father chooses whatever fits best at the moment. I suspect you are Episcopalian. Oh yes, that means for a proper courtship, you’ll have to appear at a picnic with me and row me across a pond or something. I’m supposed to giggle while you do that. Or afterward. Or before—I’ll find out.”

  Christopher smiled solicitously as Jane spoke without the slightest sign of interest on her face.

  “So you’ve decided to marry me, Miss Jane?” he asked kindly.

  “I’ve decided to accept your name, Mr. Fenroy,” she retorted. “Because that’s what this was about.”

  After their memorable “engagement,” Chris went out in public with Jane occasionally, letting himself be seen with her at the memorial service for the victims of the Wairau massacre, and at the church fete. There weren’t many other social events, and he was glad of it. He thanked God when Tuckett required him to come to the North Island a few weeks after the massacre in the Wairau Valley, which the government was referring to as an “incident.”

  On the South Island, negotiations with the Maori were stalled, as Spain had expected. But since the former governor, William Hobson, and the English arbitrator James Busby had made the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, in which the rights and obligations of the Maori and the pakeha were laid out under the rule of the British crown, the settlements had grown quickly there. The surveyors were traveling throughout the entire territory.

  Chris answered Tuckett’s call gladly and was just as glad to meet Karl Jensch again. And now it was much easier for them to communicate. Karl’s English had been improving by the day, and the young man also showed exceptional talent for the calculations and other techniques required of geographers. Frederick Tuckett had nothing but praise for him—and to Chris, Karl soon became a friend. Around campfires or in pubs in the towns, the two shared their life stories and revealed their hopes and dreams. Karl spoke of Ida, and Chris talked briefly about Jane. But Karl pressed the issue; after all, he had met the girl during the voyage.

  “But will you really be happy with her?” he said, giving voice to the doubts that had been torturing Chris. “She’s so difficult . . .”

  “She’s smart,” Chris replied. “No question of that.”

  “But still, you don’t love her!” Karl ascertained. “And she doesn’t love you either. At least it sounds that way.”

  Chris laughed bitterly. “Perhaps that will come with time.”

  Karl rolled his eyes. “If you start saying it’s God’s will, you can just move in with the Langes and the Brandmanns. Seriously, you sound like Ida talking about Ottfried. Still, at least you’re getting your farm and fulfilling your dream. But Ida—she hasn’t even admitted to herself that she deserves dreams.”

  Ida’s life at the Partridges’ left almost nothing to be desired. The house was comfortable and offered many more conveniences than her family’s cottage in Raben Steinfeld had. Ida and Elsbeth had never experienced such an agreeable winter. In Raben Steinfeld, they’d had to chop the wood for the open fireplace and carry it themselves, huddling in the single heated parlor. Here in Nelson, the winters were much milder, and the Partridges heated their house with tile stoves connected to a central chimney. Mortimer Partridge fed it himself, or occasionally asked Anton to help. The girls only had to help Mrs. Partridge in the house, and they particularly enjoyed helping out in the shop.

  Elsbeth, above all, bloomed in her role as a shop assistant. She chatted happily with the female customers and surreptitiously flirted with young men when she felt certain her father wasn’t around. Ida was more reserved, but she continued to learn English and enjoyed conversing with Mrs. Partridge about anything and everything. She would have been quite happy, if it only weren’t for the constant disparity between the dogma of the Sankt Pauli community and their actual daily existence in Nelson, which overshadowed her life and compelled her to secrecy.

  Now as before, Jakob Lange, Peter Brandmann, and the heads of the other Mecklenburg households rejected any form of assimilation. They were still refusing to learn English. While more open to their sons’ attempts to learn, their daughters were strictly forbidden to communicate any more than absolutely necessary.

  “Women must stay in the house and maintain our traditions,” Lange informed his daughters with annoyance after he’d caught Elsbeth working in the shop again. “If you get too accustomed to life here in town, you’ll lose them. This is just an ugly interlude that should have ended long ago. As soon as we finally have our land, everything will go back to the way it was. You’ll have homesteads and will marry good, pious men. You’ll have plenty to do in your gardens, fields, and kitchens. For that you won’t need to speak foreign languages!”

  He would have liked Frau Brandmann to take Ida and Elsbeth under her wing. She had completely isolated herself and her children in her host family’s home, singing only German songs and saying German prayers. However, the Brandmanns didn’t have much space, and the McDuffs were visibly bothered by Frau Brandmann’s rejection. They certainly couldn’t be expected to take in two more guests.

  So, Ida’s father hoped for land to be assigned to them soon, but the matter dragged on, and the men were very angry about it. After the incident in the Wairau Valley, they had expected a solution to be found quickly. Surely the Maori would be punished and driven off the land. But the governor in Auckland, represented by his local delegate, William Spain, seemed to see things differently. Lange and Brandmann couldn’t fathom it. Finally, they went to the German-speaking owner
of the fishing shop and asked for an explanation.

  “No, another expedition to punish the Maori wouldn’t help,” he told them. “Spain is completely right about that. It would only make the chieftain angry. I told you before, normally it’s possible to negotiate with the fellows, even about financial compensation for murder and death. They do that among themselves between tribes. There’s a custom called utu—”

  “Wergeld,” Brandmann said, naming the old German term for the concept.

  The shop owner shrugged. “Originally, they were thinking about demanding the Wairau Valley as compensation for the death of Wakefield and his men. But they couldn’t reach an agreement. Spain thinks it’s because, in this case, the pakeha still have to apologize, not the other way around. Wakefield’s brother wants blood, and the governor wants to avoid that, of course. Chieftain Te Rauparaha went to the North Island, probably to rally his allies. If the governor sends an expedition to the Ngati Toa now, it could start a major war. There would be resistance everywhere. No one wants that. So don’t get your hopes up about the land. You’ll never get the Wairau Valley. You’d do better to make hell hot for Beit! He and Wakefield conned the Maori out of so much land—somewhere, there must be something you could have.”

  Brandmann and Lange took the advice to heart and, since then, had sought out the magistrate at least once a week. Colonel Wakefield soon began to refuse to see them, especially because language was such a barrier. Beit, too, was often unavailable and seemed to melt into thin air whenever the Germans wanted something. So they brought Ottfried to translate. The young man was learning English by leaving his family every evening to go “listen” to the locals. To his father’s disappointment, he’d return stinking of beer and often of whiskey as well. Worse still, Ottfried no longer capitulated to his father’s demands that he pray or do penance. Since his return from Wairau, he had become more recalcitrant. In the opinions of Jakob Lange and Peter Brandmann, something urgently needed to be done about his attitude.

  Against their expectations, the turning point for the German settlers was initiated by the good-natured Mr. Partridge.

  “The missionary was here today,” Partridge told them over dinner, after Lange had said grace. “The German from Moutere. Can someone please translate this for Mr. Lange?”

  He looked at Ida, who he knew spoke English the best. But the young woman clamped her lips shut. She knew very well that her father would rebuke rather than praise her. Elsbeth was about to speak, but Anton must have also understood the simple sentence. Ida nodded pleadingly at him.

  Jakob Lange listened attentively as his son repeated roughly what Mr. Partridge said. Pastors Wohlers and Heine from the Sankt Pauli had joined forces with a Pastor Riemenschneider and accepted a posting in a missionary station in Moutere, about twenty miles from Nelson. They occasionally came to town to resupply, and had been asking about the German settlers.

  “They would be pleased if you would go speak to them,” Mr. Partridge finished.

  “The Lutheran missionary station?” Lange asked excitedly. “The one Beit talked about back in Mecklenburg? I thought that was just another one of his lies.”

  This turn in the conversation flummoxed Anton, but Elsbeth happily translated. She looked at her father triumphantly, and for once he forgot to rebuke her.

  “No, no,” Partridge said. “The mission has been there for a long time, but with changing occupants. It’s always been German missionaries, though; usually two or three at a time. I don’t know if they actually missionize, since there are no Maori settled in the Moutere Valley—too many floods there. The pastors must keep to themselves.”

  Ida thought that the mission must have been founded during the persecution of the early Lutherans. Perhaps the original occupants weren’t really missionaries at all, but just wanted to live in peace with their beliefs.

  “There is clergy without a congregation there?” Lange asked.

  Partridge shrugged. “Unless they give sermons to the wetas and kiwis!”

  Elsbeth broke off the translation, not wanting her father to know the extent of her English. She knew that wetas were gigantic insects, a kind of grasshopper, and kiwis were blind nocturnal birds that slept in burrows during the day.

  “How do you get there?” Lange asked.

  First thing the next morning, Brandmann, Lange, and two other elder members of the community, as well as a hungover Ottfried, set out in a cheaply chartered boat to reach the Moutere, a valley to the west of Nelson. The journey by water wasn’t long, and the men had already returned to Nelson by evening, filled with excitement.

  “We shall go live there!” Lange announced excitedly to his family and the Partridges at dinner. “Anton, give our hosts our heartfelt thanks once more for their extended hospitality. Now the possibility has finally arisen for us to live together as a community. Pastors Wohlers, Heine, and Riemenschneider are going to rent us the land behind the mission. There we can set up at least provisionally, and be among ourselves. We will be able to attend mass again and have proper prayer meetings.”

  In Nelson, the Episcopalians didn’t want to offer their church for the Lutherans’ use, and the Lutherans wouldn’t have accepted the offer anyway. So, the Sankt Pauli community met outside, and the leaders complained that their meetings were poorly attended when it rained.

  “The pastors would be happy to preach to the community. We really should have figured this out sooner. What’s more, the land is beautiful! The valley—what’s it called? It’s a paradise! Wide grasslands, which will surely be good for farming, mixed with sparse trees and all bordered by wooded hills. Farmer Friesmann is very excited.”

  “But the Moutere River floods often,” Mortimer Partridge remarked when Anton had translated his father’s enthusiastic report, summarizing roughly with the words “river, good land.” “Just be careful that you don’t get wet feet.”

  Anton didn’t bother to translate that remark.

  “We are going to see Wakefield tomorrow,” Jakob Lange said triumphantly. “He will be amazed. Of course we won’t give in until we get the land we were promised. We’ll erect temporary homes behind the mission, but we will only build our village on land we own.”

  Anton nodded while Ida and Elsbeth exchanged unhappy glances. They weren’t excited about the idea of trading their warm room at the Partridges’ for a soggy hut.

  Colonel William Wakefield granted the Germans an audience. Lange and Brandmann had immediately called a meeting of all the men of the community, and then had appeared with a five-man delegation from the Sankt Pauli in front of the magistrate. The more Lange and Brandmann waxed lyrical about the Moutere Valley, the more interested Wakefield seemed. Finally, he asked the men to wait, had someone fetch Beit, and convened briefly with him. Then the delegation was called back.

  “So, if you like it so much in the Moutere,” Wakefield said, as Beit translated, “then we would like to make you an offer of ownership. The land along the river is available.”

  Chapter 23

  “We’re finally going to get our land?”

  Brandmann had called another meeting of the settlers and told them about Wakefield’s offer. Now voices rang out in the barn that a farmer had provided for the gathering, at Beit’s request. It had been raining continuously for the last two days.

  “But the Moutere Valley, that’s far away, isn’t it?”

  “Aren’t there savages there?”

  “Is it good farmland?”

  “Why didn’t anyone think of it before?”

  Brandmann had to ask for silence before he could answer their questions.

  “Of course it’s not very close to Nelson,” he said. “That’s probably the reason no one offered it. They had promised us land nearby.”

  “What about the Wairau Valley?” Ida whispered to Ottfried, whom she had accompanied to the meeting. “That was also at least thirty miles from here . . .”

  Ottfried didn’t deign to answer. Ida noticed that he smelled of beer.
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  “But it’s not difficult to reach,” his father continued. “By boat from Nelson, it’s a stone’s throw. We got there and back easily in one day.”

  “What’s more, it’s not really in our interest to settle near our, hmm, English friends,” Lange added. “If you think about how much our traditions have already suffered, well . . . Out of sight, out of mind. The valley was just made for our village! We’ll have to give it a good German name immediately. It’s good farmland. Grassland and trees by the river, and forested hills behind where we can cut wood for building.”

  “We can start building the church right away,” Brandmann said happily. Finally, he would be able to work as a carpenter again.

  “And there are no settlements of savages anywhere near the place,” Ottfried interjected. “The missionaries assured us of that. The natives sold the land and moved away.”

  But then a voice from the doorway broke in unexpectedly. “The Maori didn’t need to move out of the Moutere Valley. They never lived there in the first place!”

  All the members of the community turned in surprise. Ida thought her heart would stop. At the entrance of the barn stood Karl Jensch.

  “And they had good reason not to live there,” he continued as he took off his hat and shook off the rain.

  Ida thought he looked good. He wasn’t as gaunt as he’d been in Raben Steinfeld. He wore his curly hair longer than before, and seemed much more self-confident.

  “The land by the Moutere River is a kind of marshland,” Karl said. The people, particularly the settlers from other villages of Mecklenburg who didn’t know him, listened with interest as he walked to the front of the room. “That means it floods every time the river rises—and it does that regularly, in winter and summer. It’s fed by streams from the mountains, and it rains there often. I must seriously advise you not to build your village in the Moutere Valley. Mr. Spain specifically registered that land as being unfit for settlement.”