The Trespass: A Novel

by Barbara Ewing

  A faint cry reached them: all the men heard it and turned: there clinging desperately to the rocks were Lucy and Annie, who had hidden in a lifeboat when the hatches to steerage were battened down and so had not been locked below. William turned the boat sideways to the rocks but could not approach nearer.

  ‘You must leap!’ called William.

  They saw that one of the girls was too frightened to move, that the other tried to persuade her even as waves washed over their heads. Then using all her last strength to haul herself upwards Lucy called, above the wind and the sea the men heard her call, do what I do, Annie, and Lucy leapt outwards, a leap of wild faith, hit the churning water slightly away from the rocks, struggled frenziedly out towards the boat, a sudden swell threw her nearer and miraculously William was able to lean out from the whaleboat, the rope again holding him, and catch at her hair that tangled in pieces of the wrecked ship.

  Leaning on the side of the boat, vomiting, hardly able to breathe, Lucy nevertheless somehow called: jump, Annie, jump now.

  Annie jumped but she did not jump far enough. They saw, all of them, how her body hit another rock below and then disappeared almost at once into the wild waves.

  * * *

  Of the one hundred and sixty-two passengers and crew who were travelling to New Zealand on the sailing ship Cloudlight to make a new life, one hundred and twenty-five lost their lives in the treacherous waters of Tristan da Cunha, the loneliest place on earth. Most of them were trapped in the steerage area where the Captain had ordered the hatches to be battened as the ship under his command took in wave after wild wave as it was swept by the wind, sail-less and anchorless, towards the fatal shore.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The Lord Fyne, having had to call in at the port of Lisbon for repairs, then delayed for many weeks in the tropics, made good time in the South Atlantic Ocean.

  On the deck of the Lord Fyne the lowering, impatient figure of the Right Honourable Sir Charles Cooper, MP, was often to be seen. Whatever the weather he walked the decks over and over, like a caged animal. He seldom spoke. He drank heavily. He had forgotten Harriet’s terrible last look; even his unconscious seemed to forget, for his unconscious fed his dreams with such visions of his daughter that he would cry out in the night. His obsession grew until it almost overpowered him.

  Perhaps he became mad, there in the South Atlantic Ocean as the Lord Fyne sailed past the islands of Tristan da Cunha in the far distance.

  The islanders saw the ship, lit fires, raised flags.

  Perhaps the Captain of the Lord Fyne saw the smoke from the island, perhaps he did not, but the Lord Fyne did not stop, sailed onwards to the end of the world.

  TWENTY-SIX

  On the Amaryllis, on the one hundred and fourteenth day, in the late afternoon while Harriet was reading Mary’s copy of ‘Vanity Fair’ in her cabin, a woman who had been wringing out a large cloth over the side of the deck suddenly dropped the cloth into the sea and screamed.

  ‘Land!’ she cried. ‘I can see land!’ and she burst into tears.

  The cry was taken up by everybody on board. Not one person was left below, they crowded the rail, pointing, crying out, weeping in relief, straining forwards for the sight of land that would mean the ordeal was over. And there, at last, like a long low cloud on the horizon, hazy at first and then darker and darker, more and more substantial as they approached, was New Zealand.

  * * *

  Land. At dawn next morning most people were still on deck, their eyes never moving from the dark shadow. Who would have thought that land, the very land itself, the long coastline of the southern island, could inspire so many feelings of relief and nervousness and wonderment and anxiety and joy. They were making for Wellington, at the bottom of the northern island: this meant, the Captain informed them, negotiating the narrow and treacherous passage between the two main islands of New Zealand. It was autumn here now, he told them, and the winds were often wild.

  ‘Let the winds be wild!’ cried Mrs Burlington Brown. ‘I have lived to see land again, nothing else matters in this world,’ and Mr Burlington Brown looked at his wife a trifle worriedly: she had been behaving strangely lately, he hoped the journey had not done her any permanent damage.

  All day the passengers stared at the coastline as it came nearer. They could not yet see details as the winds took them northwards. But they imagined trees and rivers and mountains and Englishmen.

  On the second day of traversing the coast the land suddenly came much nearer: first snow-capped mountain tops could be discerned, then swathes of dark green bush reaching right down to the sea. And then a canoe suddenly appeared. Nothing could have been more strange to the passengers hanging over the rail of the Amaryllis than the sight – their first sight of other human beings apart from the Portuguese stick figures – of scantily clad natives paddling towards them shouting and laughing, some of them women. As it got nearer the passengers of the Amaryllis could see that the canoe was laden down with vegetables and fruit, and then they saw there were pigs in the canoe as well as people. An apparent leader and several others climbed aboard with great agility and said good morning. Many of the ladies turned away, deeply shocked by the sight of so much flesh (brown flesh at that) while the crew negotiated to buy the fresh food. Harriet observed that some of the sailors seemed to know a few words of the native language, and that the price of all the produce brought on board was a roll of brightly coloured fabric, which had obviously been carried from England for this purpose.

  When the natives – the Maoris as they were properly called – paddled away back to land they began to sing in a strange language and their voices echoed back to the Amaryllis. To the passengers’ enormous surprise, for of course they did not understand the words, the tune was very familiar. The Maoris were, quite clearly, singing ‘Home, Sweet Home’.

  And Harriet Cooper began to laugh. On the long days on the Amaryllis no-one had ever seen Harriet laugh. They had seen the smile that lit up her face in such an extraordinary manner, Mr Nicholas Tennyson knew he would never forget that smile. But Harriet was leaning on the ship’s rail and laughing. It crossed Mr Burlington Brown’s mind that ladies should not really laugh – there was something (he could hardly articulate the word even to himself) abandoned in laughter – but he could not stop himself from watching. Her head was back and her hair was caught by the wind and her long, slim hand lay at her throat as ‘Home, Sweet Home’ still drifted across the water. And then, infected, other passengers began to laugh too: laughter rippled from the poop deck and down on to the main deck; small boys ran joyously over the ship’s ropes, thin weary women felt the journey dropping from their shoulders and men smiled. The sound rippled away at last and the fresh food was taken below and people moved, still smiling, from one part of the ship to another, and the timbers of the Amaryllis sighed and settled and the ship moved onwards, nearer and nearer to its destination.

  Colours appeared as well as the bright, dark green bush: yellow flowers, dark red trees in bloom. Coloured birds that looked like strange parrots flashed inquisitively by. At dusk the Amaryllis cast anchor for the first time. They were near the top of the southern island and there they would wait till morning: the straits between the two islands were too dangerous to navigate in the darkness.

  Even the steerage passengers were given a pig to roast; at the Captain’s table fresh meat and vegetables were savoured, healths were drunk, speeches were made and everyone was aware of the odd silence: there were no sails and the sea was calm. Mrs Burlington Brown and the magistrate’s wife had made their peace and vowed eternal friendship. (Again Mr Burlington Brown thought that the sooner he got his wife off the ship the better: she was becoming effusive, that was the only word for it, and she had spoken to him most sharply when he had mentioned the dreadful state of the feathers on her hat.)

  There was speculation about friends and relations, about Mr Nicholas Tennyson’s older brother who had come here a year ago, about Miss Harriet Cooper’s cousin, Edward
, the gentleman farmer. Miss Eunice Burlington Brown asked Harriet more questions about her cousin, her recovered heart beat in anticipation.

  ‘There is no way of knowing of course,’ said Captain Stark, ‘when the Miranda might have arrived – she left three weeks before us and for all we know she could have arrived many days ago. But you have seen what the weather can do. The Miranda could even be behind us. We made record time through the Bay of Biscay but then we were becalmed. The whole journey has occasionally been done in under ninety days – and over two hundred with the worst of luck. We have had a lonely run with no news of anyone, but sometimes three or four ships are long delayed in the Bay, and I have seen a dozen vessels becalmed together in the tropics for weeks on end. You will have to wait a little longer, Miss Cooper, for news of the Miranda.’

  Mr Nicholas Tennyson and Mr Aloysius Porter had been told of hotels in Wellington where passengers could stay. Captain Stark advised Harriet of very respectable lodgings for young gentlewomen. ‘Those hotels along the waterfront,’ he said, ‘are no place for an unchaperoned young woman.’ Mr Burlington Brown seemed disinclined to give up his role of guardian, made suggestions that Harriet should stay with him and his wife and Miss Eunice. Harriet smiled her beautiful smile at everyone and thanked them for their advice.

  The Captain wanted Harriet to sing, as she had so often on the long journey, but the piano had become so damp and so out of tune that such a final performance was not possible. Miss Eunice Burlington Brown surprised everyone, especially her brother, by offering to recite a dramatic poem Casablanca ‘written by the late lamented poetess Mrs Felicia Henman’, and immediately launched into

  The boy stood on the burning deck

  Whence all but he had fled;

  The flame that lit the battle’s wreck

  Shone round him o’er the dead.

  She recited all ten verses and was applauded resolutely.

  * * *

  Such was the feeling that they had already landed, that their journey was at last over, that the passengers were extremely surprised and not a little put out to find themselves spending the next night strapped to their beds once more. The straits between the two islands were indeed treacherous. Again and again the Captain had tried to make for Wellington with only the foreshortened mainsail, again and again the ship was turned about by the wild winds. Finally, at dawn on the second day, the winds died down and a cold sea fog came down over the Amaryllis so that she might have been in the South Atlantic still. But the fog lifted and the sun began to shine and Captain Stark was able at last to sail his brave and stalwart Amaryllis through the heads and into the port of Wellington town.

  Harriet, at the rail as soon as she felt the winds subside at first light, gasped.

  For there was the magical harbour she had first seen in the drawing in Edward’s book, only now she could see it in truth: the small wooden dwellings, the enclosed blue bay, the green tree-covered hills, the sea. But as they came closer she saw that it was different from the picture: there were many more small dwellings, they had spread upwards on to the foothills, the sun caught their roofs. There were fewer green trees. And the hills rose up so high: where would the farms be? There were murmurs of anxiety amongst the passengers. But the calm waters of the harbour sparkled in the morning sunshine and the sky was as she remembered seeing it, leading upwards forever and giving the feeling of infinite space. And there was no wind at all.

  She breathed in the fresh, calm air and thought she could smell grass. Smoke rose straight upwards from the chimneys of the little houses. A crowd of tiny birds flew over the Amaryllis as if in welcome. Somewhere there on the shore, surely, was her favourite cousin, the kind, rotund and smiling Edward Cooper.

  In this place she would make her life. She had no fear at all.

  This would be her Home. Sweet Home.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Edward Cooper dreamed night after night of wild, tangled, vicious native bush.

  It was trying to destroy him.

  He had good reason to recall his father’s words: never buy land without seeing it. What, on the survey maps of the New Zealand Company, had looked like prime farming acres ready for cultivation had turned out to be unsurveyed, bush-covered hillside stretching up to the sky and down to the sea, only reachable from Wellington town by boat; or by a day and a half’s trek, first along fair roads (by the standards of the town) but later through bush and trees along muddy overgrown tracks full of treacherous roots and stumps, then along rocky tidal beaches that tore at horses’ shoes on every journey. The ‘choice’ they were promised was between one section and the one next to it, or the one next to that, all in the same place. Even his ‘town half-acre’ was over two hours’ march on half-roads. Edward, who was as optimistic and positive as an immigrant could hope to be, had found his cheerful manner sorely tried.

  His friends Chapman and Lyle quickly made their choice: angrily they tried to sell their land back to the New Zealand Company; when this failed they advertised the sections in the Wellington Independent and The New Zealand Spectator and Cook’s Strait Guardian and decided to venture up the coast where they had heard the opportunities for good land were much better: flat land (they were told), rivers, roads of a kind. They would not be able to afford to buy unless their initial capital was realised, but they could rent or lease, even (it was said) from the natives. Sheep-farming was the answer (they were advised); it wasn’t what the New Zealand Company had planned for farmers but it was turning out to be the most profitable way of using much of this new country. All three of them bought horses: the friends prepared to part. Edward told them he would begin clearing land for his house – not on his town section but on his hillside, a day and a half from town.

  ‘If I am to work the land,’ said Edward, ‘I must live on the land. I am a farmer.’

  ‘That is a ludicrous plan,’ said Chapman. ‘That land is absolutely hopeless. Come with us.’

  ‘No,’ said Edward.

  ‘Eddie, you’re a farmer. What you have been given is not farming land, it is wild bush-covered mountains. Come with us.’

  ‘No,’ said Edward.

  Chapman and Lyle looked at each other: both had the same thought. They could not leave Edward without helping him: he was intractable, but he was their friend. They went back around the coast with half of Edward’s belongings, wondering if a second look would somehow prove the land better than they had thought. But nothing had changed: still the high, bush-covered hills stretched upwards. There had to be somewhere for Edward to live: the three men worked from dawn until dusk in sunshine and rain and the Wellington wind; no-one had warned them of the wind. It was unfamiliar, back-breaking, harsh physical work. They chopped down some of the smaller trees; hacked at tangled, springing native bush; tried to burn a clearing but had much difficulty with damp undergrowth; finally cleared with their axes the best flat space near the sea. In the evenings, exhausted, they sat beside a fire, tearing at old bread and salted pork. They talked of sheep-farming; talked of England. They wondered if gold would be found in New Zealand as it had been in America, Canada, Australia: surely there will be gold here, they said, as they stared at the malign forest. They talked of the disaffected natives who, they had been warned, still stalked the land: always made sure their guns were near when they slept at night. They talked of the women in Wellington town who were obviously looking for husbands: they knew it would be years before they could afford the luxury of a wife and they turned, unsettled, on their lonely mattresses.

  Once they had a cleared a place for Edward’s house they then completely cleared a small part of the hillside and turned the earth for planting because Edward insisted, and cleared some land around the fresh spring, the one asset on the hillside. Once they heard a strange rumbling sound and felt the ground shake beneath them: they waited almost mesmerised for the land to open, this was one of the famous earthquakes, but the rumbling disappeared into nothing and they felt almost cheated. Once they caught sight briefly of a
n animal, a large pig or a large dog, reached for their guns, but the animal disappeared back into the bush. They caught their first fish, burnt it over their fire and drank the fresh pure water from the spring and talked of the London cholera. So often the wind blew, but on the calm nights under the stars, eating fresh fish as strange birds and insects called and the sea lapped below them, all three of them – despite their anger and disappointment and sheer physical exhaustion – declared that it was perhaps, after all, an adventure worth having, for England.

  When enough land had been cleared for Edward to at least start, when enough good logs for building had been piled high, Chapman and Lyle – assured by their friend that he could build a shelter by himself, that he was a fine builder with long experience of such work on his father’s farm – made their decision to press northwards to try and settle somewhere before winter came. Edward rode back into the town with them, spent the night before they went at one of the waterfront hotels. Accordions played, men’s voices sang of the girls they left behind them, other girls called in the dark from along the quay. Natives sat in little groups where their canoes lay on the shore, talking long into the night in their strange, soft language.

  The three men drank ale from England, hoped to meet again, Edward clasped their hands in farewell and thanked them for their friendship.

  * * *

  He bought a small cart, hitched it to his horse, engaged three natives to help him carry everything round the coast, through the bush and on to his land. They transported the rest of his belongings from England; he bought wooden planks and wooden roof tiles from the Kai Warra Warra mill; he bought better axes, bags of potatoes and flour and pork and other supplies from the stores on the waterfront. Edward had never cooked: Chapman and Lyle had taught him that something at least edible could be obtained if you threw everything into one pot, filled it with water, and left it on the fire. On the journey back to his property the natives entertained him, in quaint English, with fantastical stories of their ancestors, and gossip about other settlers. They taught him to make a bed of the springy bracken that grew everywhere about them; he was surprised at the comfort and smiled at the stars in the middle of the night. They also taught Edward to greet them in their own language: tena koutou, he would say to them each morning of their travels. On the morning of the second day it rained. He gathered from the Maoris’ demeanour that they would not be moving any further that day. He put up his tarpaulin again. The natives sat under a tree smoking the new tobacco the English had brought, talking and laughing: Edward presumed they were talking about him. When the rain at last stopped the following morning his employees lifted their sacks and walked cheerfully on through the mud.