Fires of Change (The Fire Blossom Saga)

by Sarah Lark

  Cat knew it would soon be time to make the trip again, and she was glad of it. For years, she’d accompanied Chris and the drovers on their trek to the mountains. She loved making camp in the wilderness, hearing the cries of the night birds, and gazing at the stars while the campfire slowly burned to embers. The men would pass around a whiskey bottle and tell stories about their adventures, and would sometimes take a harmonica or fiddle out of their saddlebags and play a few tunes. It reminded Cat of nights in the Ngati Toa village where she’d spent her youth. She could almost still hear the lyrical melodies of putorino and koauau flutes and Te Ronga’s gentle voice as she told stories about her peoples’ gods. And Cat loved nestling against Chris, feeling safe and at home by his side.

  The boat sped along the river, and Cat and the girls waved as they passed the Redwood house. Cat had been friends with Laura Redwood for years, but there was no sign of her now, or of her husband and his brothers. Still, Cat wanted to be polite in case anyone was standing at the window. Laura had just given birth to her fourth child and would hopefully be taking it easy at home. Usually, she worked as tirelessly on her farm as Cat did at Rata Station. Although Laura preferred handling sheep and horses to housework, she was quite a good cook, and certainly more domestic than Cat was. Laura was very proud of the stone house that her husband, Joseph, had finally built for her after years of wooden ones. Her living room was filled with her handwoven rugs and throws and embroidered pillows, whereas Cat felt uncomfortable surrounded by abundant furnishings. She preferred the minimalist, practical interiors of Maori homes.

  Cat gazed ahead expectantly. Somewhere here was the border between Redwood and Rata Station. She looked beyond the wild flax and raupo reeds that grew thickly on the banks and tried to catch a glimpse of her sheep. She was able to make out a few ewes much closer than she had expected, sitting in the shade of manuka and cabbage trees, chewing their cuds. One animal was perched atop one of the large rocks that jutted out of the grasslands. In Cat’s opinion, the stones gave the plains character, and she knew the Maori considered them the dwelling places of gods and spirits that protected the land.

  “What are the sheep doing here?” she asked Linda and Carol. “Did you drive them over for grazing? They’re supposed to be going to the highlands with the drovers next week.”

  Carol shrugged. “They probably escaped from Chris. The fresh grass is tempting. I can ride out tomorrow morning and bring them back. Fancy will be delighted.”

  The dog let out a bark of acknowledgment. The three women laughed.

  “Speaking of escaping,” Georgie said, “I found another letter for you. It had somehow escaped from the stack.” He dug in one of his heavy bags and pulled out an envelope. “So sorry.”

  “It happens,” Cat said unworriedly. “Oh, look, girls, this is from Karl and Ida.”

  Linda and Carol turned, curious. Karl and Ida had been away for several months. Karl had surveying jobs all over the North Island, and Ida and their younger daughter, Margaret—who went by Mara—were accompanying him. Now they were expected to be back soon. Cat smiled as she read.

  “They’re in Lyttelton already! They arrived yesterday with the ship, direct from Wellington. Ida says they want to recover there overnight. Apparently, the crossing was quite stormy, and her horse is still seasick. That means they must be setting out about now, and they’ll be here in a few days! Karl will be able to help with the droving. Ida thinks he feels guilty because their trip took so long. And she has exciting news.”

  Carol giggled. “Maybe Mara is betrothed.”

  Linda rolled her eyes. “Mara only has eyes for Eru. And it would break his heart if she got engaged to a pakeha—”

  “Girls, Mara is only fifteen!” Cat scolded. “We’re not even thinking about her getting engaged yet. And whatever you do, don’t let Jane hear you talking about Mara and Eru! She wouldn’t take kindly to her golden boy being interested in a local girl. She wants to send him to college.”

  “And he’ll have to marry a Maori princess, at the very least, who will bring half of the North Island into the marriage,” Linda said with a laugh.

  “No, a sheep baroness would be even better!” Carol countered. “Let’s see: aristocratic lineage is a must—”

  “After all, he’s a chieftain’s son!” Linda said, imitating Jane’s haughty voice.

  Jane Te Rohi to te Ingarihi—formerly Jane Beit—was English. The Maori name her beloved husband had given her meant “English rose.” Before she had fallen in love with Te Haitara, the local Maori chieftain, she had been married to Chris. Their marriage had never been a love match, and the tribal elder had granted them a divorce, to the relief of all.

  “And of course she’d have to be the sole heir of at least ten thousand sheep,” Carol went on, describing Jane’s dream daughter-in-law. “As well as being a vision of beauty, and able to intelligently quote Adam Smith between kisses.”

  Linda giggled. The Scottish economist was one of Jane’s guiding lights. “In the evenings, she’d entertain Eru by reciting logarithm tables by heart.”

  “And instead of carving hearts on trees,” Carol continued, “they’d carve formulas for maximizing profits.”

  “Stop it, you’re both terrible!” Cat scolded.

  Georgie grinned. Jane’s head for business was well known. She had made her husband’s tribe rich first by setting up trade for traditional medicines and good-luck charms, and then with sheep breeding. However, her salesmanship had also put her in constant conflict with the Maori tribe’s traditional spirituality and placidity. Additionally, her cold, self-assured manner put a strain on the relationship between her husband and his people.

  But Jane’s son, Te Eriatara, whom she called Eric and everyone else called Eru, was considered a very agreeable boy. He was six months younger than Ida’s daughter Mara, and it had been practical to educate the children together. Jane had hired Miss Foggerty, a middle-aged Englishwoman who devoted herself wholeheartedly to giving the children of the local settlers and Maori a strict, classical education. Mara and Eru hated her, a fact that brought the childhood friends closer than ever. Before anything could happen, though, the Jensches had taken their daughter with them to the North Island.

  The boat now drifted past the outbuildings of Rata Station, and Cat smiled with satisfaction at the stable fences, the roomy shearing shed, and above all, the multitudes of sheep crowded together in their pens. The shearing was in full swing, and hundreds of beautiful, valuable fleeces sat stacked on the bed of a wagon. Cat, Chris, and Karl had started their farm years ago with three herds of Merino-Romney crosses and French Rambouillets. They were among the first to bring sheep to the Canterbury Plains, after the Deanses and the Redwoods, and their farm was now one of the leading businesses on the South Island. In large part, they had Cat to thank for that. Catherine Rata of Rata Station was very well known, far past Christchurch, the city at the mouth of the Avon.

  Chris Fenroy didn’t mind not being as famous as his partner. He loved his work, and he loved Cat. Linda and Carol were like daughters to him. Neither did he mind that, in the last few years, Rata Station’s third associate, Karl, had been traveling more than he was on the farm. Karl’s earnings as a surveyor had contributed to the early advancement of their breeding business, and now further investment was hardly necessary at all. Rata Station was self-sustaining, and it was flourishing. Chris was a happy man.

  And it showed. When Chris saw Georgie rowing the boat toward the pier, he dropped everything and ran over, smiling and waving. Strands of his unruly brown hair had escaped from the leather tie that bound it in a ponytail. His warm hazel eyes glowed with anticipation. He put his hands around Cat’s waist and lifted her effortlessly to dry land. Then he helped Linda and Carol, and laughingly defended himself from Fancy’s jubilant greeting.

  “Here you all are!” he said happily. “I missed you!”

  “All of us, or just the dog?” Cat teased.

  Chris patted Fancy. “Well, she does
most of the work,” he teased back. “But of course, I prefer the company of cats.” He took Cat’s hand in his own and kissed it. “How did it go with the Butlers?” he asked, after everyone had thanked Georgie and the boatman had been paid and sent on his way. “Are they going to sell us the ram?”

  Cat nodded.

  “And what about your future mother-in-law?” Chris said, turning to Carol.

  She winced. “I don’t think I quite meet her standards. I don’t make enough effort with ladylike activities, and I might not be able to keep up with my ‘social obligations.’”

  “Mrs. Butler would obviously prefer a proper young lady,” Linda added archly. “One with a talent for landscaping formal gardens modeled after the park at Preston Manor.”

  Linda captured Deborah’s tone of voice so precisely that Chris and Cat had to laugh, though they knew they should scold her for being disrespectful.

  “If that’s what the lady wants, we can surely give Carol a few cuttings to take over.” Cat toyed with a blossom from the rata bush at the end of the pier. “Then her garden would bloom like Rata Station.”

  “And we can work out the aristocratic part too,” Chris joked. “I just have to adopt Carol. Or would it be better if I had an honest talk with Deborah about what happens if one marries for name alone?”

  Chris’s brief marriage to Jane had been arranged on the strength of his noble lineage. It hadn’t made either of them happy.

  “I’m going to marry Oliver!” Carol declared. “Not his mother or his farm or his name or anything else! Oliver loves me, and I love him. He would marry me even if I—if I—”

  “‘She was a lass of the low country, and he was a lord of high degree,’” Chris sang, horribly out of tune.

  Cat remained silent. She wasn’t convinced that Oliver didn’t share his mother’s prejudices a little. It was doubtlessly better that the Butlers didn’t know how Carol and Linda had been conceived—even if Oliver had unwittingly chosen the “twin” born in wedlock.

  Oliver Butler actually did accompany his father’s ram to Rata Station, and Carol rode out to meet him. But she didn’t get the romantic tryst she’d hoped for. Captain Butler had sent two experienced drovers with his son, and at a time when every hand was needed on the farm! Carol suspected Deborah had intervened, and she felt sorry for Oliver. She herself would have been mortified if Chris and Cat hadn’t trusted her with such a simple task. But for his part, Oliver was quite pleased with the men’s company. If he’d been alone, he told Carol cheerfully, he would have had to return home immediately. Captain Butler had traded the young ram for three ewes from Rata Station and wanted to integrate the creatures into the herd before they were taken to the highlands for the summer.

  “But the drovers are going to work here for a couple of days, so now I can stay with you and then ride down to Christchurch for the final training for the regatta. Joe will be happy. We’ll be unbeatable!”

  Chris Fenroy furrowed his brow when the young man made his plans known at dinner. “Can your father do without you for so long?” he asked in surprise. “Doesn’t he need every man for the shearing?”

  Oliver shrugged. “Oh, Father sees it from an athletic point of view. It’s an honor if we win the gold medal for Butler Station! And if I were in college in England now, I wouldn’t be able to help either.”

  Deborah Butler would have liked to send her son to Oxford or Cambridge. As far as Chris and Cat knew, that was the only wish her husband hadn’t capitulated to. He wanted Oliver to stay in the plains and learn how to run a sheep farm from the bottom up. For that, he didn’t need any higher education. Perhaps allowing Oliver to train for the regatta was part of Butler’s compromise with his wife.

  In the next two days, Oliver made himself useful at Rata Station—mostly because Carol didn’t give him the option of drinking tea or taking strolls. Instead, she asked him to accompany her when she rode the perimeter to check the fences and when she herded the sheep in and out of various pastures. In that way, Carol finally got her romantic time alone with Oliver. She held his hand as the horses walked across the wide fields, and she got dizzy when the knee-high tussock grass moved like waves in the wind. It felt as though they were riding through a spring-green ocean, from which bizarrely formed stones occasionally stuck out like islands.

  And of course they found time to let the horses graze while they spread out a blanket in the inviting shade of a manuka tree. Carol wasn’t an enthusiastic cook; she didn’t have time to prepare the kind of delicacies that Deborah Butler liked to spoil her son with. But she had packed some cold roast lamb and fresh bread from the kitchen, and told him she’d felt very baroness-like when she’d added a bottle of wine to her basket.

  “Cat will kill me,” she said with a giggle.

  Her adoptive mother enjoyed wine, but it was expensive and complicated to order from Christchurch. For that reason, Cat seldom allowed herself the pleasure. She wouldn’t be pleased to find out that a bottle was missing.

  Oliver didn’t really care what he ate or drank as long as Carol was with him and didn’t resist when he put his arms around her. Now out of his mother’s sight, she returned his affections enthusiastically, and even allowed him to undo a few buttons of her blouse and kiss the tops of her breasts.

  For her own part, Carol allowed her hands to roam under Oliver’s shirt and stroke his smooth skin and muscular body. Finally, she encouraged him to take off his shirt and regarded him with obvious pleasure.

  “I finally understand why men row,” she murmured, and traced his biceps with the tip of her finger. “You look like one of those marble statues. You know, the Greek ones in the foyer of the White Hart.”

  In England it was fashionable to decorate noble homes with antique Greek or Roman art, and the owner of the hotel in Christchurch had embraced the trend. Since then, there had been dissent in the provincial religious community about whether the exhibition of naked male bodies should be allowed in the name of culture, or if it was corrupting the innocence of the youth.

  “Michelangelo’s David,” Oliver said, smiling as he pushed Carol’s blouse a little farther over her shoulders to get a look at her breasts. “Did you know my mother’s seen it? The real one, in Florence. Oh, Europe must be fascinating. Perhaps I should have gone there to study. Or maybe we’ll go together someday. Would you like that? Of course, we would only stay at the best hotels.”

  Carol and Oliver had a certain glow about them when they returned to Rata Station that evening. Cat regarded Ida’s daughter thoughtfully, and Linda looked at her sister in annoyance. But there was no excuse to scold her. Carol had checked the fences as she had been told to, and Fancy danced happily around the five escaped sheep that Carol had found and brought back. Cat trusted both girls when it came to the temptation of physical pleasure. They knew very well what happened in bed between men and women. After all, they’d grown up in close proximity to a Maori tribe, and most of their friends had already had experiences with boys. The Maori didn’t share the Europeans’ prudery. They allowed their teenagers to experiment before they finally chose a partner. Some of the Maori boys had made attempts with Linda and Carol, and they had been allowed a few stolen caresses in the shelter of rata thickets. But nothing more had come of it. The girls listened to Cat, who dissuaded them from going too far.

  “The problem is that rumors would go around with the pakeha. Believe me, all it would take would be for some boy to brag a little in front of the drovers, and your good reputation would be gone, stupid as that is.”

  Cat knew all too well how the European community felt about girls’ sexuality. When she’d had to leave the Maori and move to Nelson, the white citizens of the town had made up such wild stories about her that her safety was threatened. In the end, she’d had to flee.

  Of course, Linda and Carol were not in that kind of danger; they had the protection of their families. At the same time, they hadn’t shown signs of serious interest in any Maori boys, and Cat suspected they would seek
their future husbands among the pakeha. For that reason, Cat thought it better if they conformed to pakeha customs.

  That night, Oliver attempted to convince Carol to ride out into the night with him, but she declined. Still, she was delighted about the idea of going with him the following year when they were married to drive the sheep to the mountains, like Cat did with Chris.

  “Then we’ll make love under the stars,” she whispered, after they’d kissed an acceptable distance from Cat and Chris’s Maori-style wooden house. The land stretched down to the river, like Deborah Butler’s garden. The Waimakariri twisted through the open plains like a band of liquid silver in the moonlight. The silhouette of a cabbage tree threw strange, magical-looking shadows on the riverbank. “It’ll be like a dream, Oliver. Much, much more beautiful even than Florence.”

  Oliver nodded, but he didn’t look particularly convinced. He wanted Carol and longed to explore her body in moonlight or sunlight, under the stars or under the canopies of the luxurious English beds at Butler Station. If he were honest, he’d prefer a comfortable bedroom to a tent on the plains. But it was better if he didn’t admit that to Carol. She would be more reasonable when they were married. And if his mother managed to talk his father into letting her send them to Europe as a wedding present, he knew Carol wouldn’t object.