The Trespass: A Novel

by Barbara Ewing

  ‘I have just been putting everything in this,’ said Edward, pointing rather shamefacedly to a pot by the fire. Something mouldy stared out of its depths and although Harriet looked at it in distaste she could not hide her smile as she realised their predicament: her cousin Edward, bemusedly surrounded by women untrained in basic domestic skills, and the small, rough room and all of them exhausted from their journey. The light had faded and there was the sound of the sea, shshshing over the sand below them. The new dog barked outside, chasing something up the hill, and strange insects trilled in the trees.

  ‘We can make tea,’ said Harriet. ‘And we can light the candles and there is bread. Tomorrow we will try to think of cooking. Edward, I believe I see that you are to be temporarily removed from your new house!’ Edward himself smiled at last.

  ‘I am a champion in a tent,’ he said.

  ‘Miss Eunice must have the bed tonight,’ said Harriet. ‘And Hetty could sleep on the rubber mattress. And I will make a mattress from the bracken as you taught me, Eddie, and sleep on a rug on the floor.’ Nobody argued, Edward himself made the tea, he and Harriet tore at the big loaf of bread, Miss Eunice had a small dry crust, but Hetty, now both pale and flushed, could not eat at all. In half an hour Miss Eunice wished to retire and Hetty asked to lie down also.

  Edward and Harriet sat quietly at last outside the little house beside the fire, both wrapped in blankets that Harriet recognised from Rusholme, tin mugs of tea on the ground beside them. The night was calm, the moon shone down on the quiet, black sea. Occasionally one of the horses snorted. Edward asked if he might smoke his pipe. The new dog sat between them, looking slightly lost, and for just a moment Harriet thought of Quintus, her dear dog Quintus, in another, different life.

  ‘That young girl is not at all well,’ said Edward. ‘Her arm has not knitted properly after all that time, I can see the bone move. She is very lucky it has not become poisoned, she could have lost the arm, or even died.’

  ‘What can we do?’

  ‘I could try to straighten it, set it again properly.’

  ‘You are not a doctor!’

  ‘I am a farmer! But – she looks like a strong girl.’ And Edward stared with an unreadable expression into the darkness and they said nothing more about Hetty Green.

  ‘It’s lovely here, Edward. It’s beautiful.’

  ‘But not for a farmer,’ he said gloomily and his cousin remained silent: she had seen it was not a farm.

  ‘Harriet.’

  She saw his earnest, anxious face in the firelight, got up at once to wash the mugs in the water that was warm from the fire.

  ‘But Harriet, we must talk about this.’ And Edward gave a small inward sigh. He was a practical person, and a kind person, and he did not relish the role that was being forced upon him, but he was Harriet’s only relative here, and he was a man, and he must look after her, he must take a firm stand. ‘I have been thinking about your situation. Have you considered that the next ship might even bring your father here?’

  She was caught in the light of the fire as she stood there; the look on her face as she stared back at him was one of such shock that he saw that she had not considered any such thing.

  ‘But Harriet, of course he will try to find you. Surely you realise that? Whatever did you think would happen? He would have looked for you. He would soon have found out what had become of you, surely, a man with his contacts and influence! And then at the very least he will send messages to the New Zealand Company, they will easily find me, looking for you, and you will be sent back to England. Did you not see everybody take in your arrival? In a small settlement like this everybody soon knows everybody else. And as you have heard, standards must be maintained, even your conduct on the journey out will, I assure you, have been already discussed by people you have not yet had the pleasure of meeting, and certainly they will know you have come here to visit my land across the harbour. Should your father have decided to make the journey himself, I expect it would take him, with his particular contacts, fifteen minutes from stepping ashore to ascertain your whereabouts. Surely you must have realised that!’ He saw that Harriet had not, she stood as if carved from stone, still holding the mugs and staring at him in horror.

  ‘But, Harriet, whatever did you think would happen? That your father would just forget about you? What would my own father do if Augusta or Alice – or more likely Asobel,’ and he permitted himself a small smile, ‘had for some unthinkable reason done what you had done? My father would go to the ends of the earth to find them again, because he loves them and is responsible for them, and because it would be his duty to do so.’ Still Harriet said nothing.

  ‘And dearest Harriet, just at this moment I have to be responsible for you. As I would be for my sisters if they were here. It is my duty to be so. I cannot tell you how good it is to actually see you here, sitting in front of me – it’s almost like a dream, you and I sitting here in front of this fire so far from home. It would be wonderful if you were here safely, by that I suppose I mean perhaps with your father rather than without him. But—’ and Edward sighed (perhaps he was glad that he was not a young woman to whom these things must be said), ‘I think the freedom of your long journey on the ship has turned your mind. You are not thinking clearly. The journey on the ship is just a hiatus, nothing more: when I was sailing here I often thought of that. Such a long journey is something like a pause in one’s life and everything hangs in abeyance. But journeys end, and you have to pick up the threads of your life again eventually, you cannot sail on and on forever like the Flying Dutchman! Your father is your legal guardian and what you have done you seem to have done without his permission. Wellington may be thousands and thousands of miles away and seem nothing but a frontier town but we live here under English law, we have a governor and courts and magistrates, and I imagine one of the very next ships will bring your father’s instructions.’ (Harriet saw in her mind Peters, her father’s servant, shadowy in the darkness at the door of Mary’s room; felt suddenly something she thought she had forgotten: the suffocating silence of the house in Bryanston Square and her own terror as she listened for footsteps.)

  She stood up quickly. ‘I will just walk down to the sea and back,’ she said, ‘the moon is as bright as a lantern.’ Edward listened to her footsteps, heard her boots crunching on the pebbles and then there was silence. He stood and stared down into the darkness below, then saw her dark figure, ghostly by the sea, quite still. He thought of how she’d struck him when he first saw her: a dark angel. He watched her carefully, puffing on his pipe, the dog alert now, beside him. An owl, or perhaps a strange native bird, called somewhere nearby. It was not so long ago that his cousins and his sisters had screamed at the sight of a fieldmouse: here Harriet could be confronted by a huge rat in the dark, or a wild pig, or one of the mad Maori hunting dogs that they’d heard lurked in the bush. He had not yet had time to warn her of these things, or to tell her that he always kept his gun near, to tell her that there were rumours about disaffected natives coming back to claim their land they said they had not sold: land that they said had been stolen.

  At last Harriet came back: Edward made it clear that she must sit down again and Harriet, slowly, obeyed him. Edward spoke again.

  ‘What did you think, Harriet – just suppose you had your father’s permission and assistance – that you would do in New Zealand?’ By the firelight her face seemed even paler than he ever remembered it and there was something in her eyes he could not fathom.

  ‘At least at first, I thought I could help you.’

  ‘You can see that I am in trouble here. And even should I stay and employ men to help me, it is a man’s work that is needed, you surely understand that.’

  ‘I am strong.’

  ‘You are a woman. And you can see the situation, I can hardly help myself. And winter is coming. Ah – I remember how hopeful and confident I was, reading the books at Rusholme. I am afraid the reality is a little different.’

 
‘But, Eddie.’ Harriet’s beautiful face, all shadows, showed great astonishment. ‘It is beautiful! It is free! It is a new chance!’

  Her cousin gave her a very old-fashioned look. ‘It is not free, Harriet, believe me. All my money is tied up in this useless, beautiful, unfarmable land.’

  ‘I have money, Edward. You can have it. I shall give it all to you, I don’t know how to manage it anyway. And I could at least be your housekeeper.’ Both the cousins involuntarily looked at the tin mugs that had held the tea Edward had been forced to make for them and both of them, just as involuntarily, even in the middle of the serious conversation, laughed.

  ‘Well, I can learn, Eddie,’ said Harriet, still smiling slightly, moving closer to the fire. ‘I will learn. There are books about cooking, I know there are. Mary always told me she and our mother had for years a book called “New Systems of Domestic Cookery Formed Upon Principles of Economy and Adapted For the Use of Private Families”, but try as we would in all the bookcases we could never find it. I’ve never forgotten the title because it made us laugh. Now Mary should see me being punished for my frivolity! But I will find such a book. I will be glad to learn to cook. It will make me feel useful. Also, I would like to teach young children, I enjoyed teaching Asobel.’

  But Edward’s face became serious and he shook his head. ‘And your father I remember would not even consent to you teaching her.’ He had to look away for a moment from the intensity of his cousin’s expression. ‘Harriet, dear Harriet, just suppose you may stay. You must be realistic about the life here. There are many what they call Distressed Gentlewomen in Wellington. There is nothing so sad, truly. I think—’ and he lowered his voice, ‘forgive me, Harriet, but if I am not mistaken your friend Miss Eunice Burlington Brown seems to be one of those women. They do not have money of their own and were trained for nothing in England except to hope to be wives of gentlemen and that is why many of them came here, I believe, hoping to find a husband – for there are twice as many men as women here. But those unattached men are mostly men like me who simply cannot yet think of the luxury of a wife unless we are prepared to marry below our station – and indeed I have heard that some men have done so and damned the social consequences. They have chosen as a bride someone who can work, rather than someone who cannot and who would expect to have servants as they would at home. So there are dozens of so-called governesses, or music teachers, hoping for the kind of marriage they were reared to in England, in the meantime advertising for work in a discreet and respectable manner, thinking that they can teach young girls to be “ladies”. Their position is sad enough in England, but it is clear that girls here are going to have to learn much more practical things than just being ladies. To cook, for a start.’ Regarding his cousin carefully Edward saw that her eyes glittered: it could have been unshed tears, or it could have been anger that made them shine.

  ‘I am not a distressed gentlewoman. I have money, as I told you. And I am certainly not looking for a husband.’

  ‘Not you, Harriet. I did not mean you.’

  ‘But it is true I have been trained for nothing. Nothing at all. I will have to learn.’ And she got up from the fire.

  ‘Goodnight, dear Edward,’ she said. ‘I am so glad to have found you.’

  Outside his house he heard her rustling and moving quietly. Edward sighed. He was, of course, responsible for her. They seemed not to have got very far, but at least they had spoken of her situation. Slowly he doused the fire and made his way to where the small tent and his bracken bed and his gun waited for him. The new dog curled up and sighed outside and at once they were both asleep.

  Inside the house Hetty and Miss Eunice slept uneasily in their new surroundings: both of them made little restless noises of agitation; several times Hetty cried out in pain and then was quiet again. Both of them had removed their corsets which hung, ghostly shapes, over Edward’s only chair, their laces touching the floor. Harriet realised, touched, that Miss Eunice must have helped the servant girl to undress. She added her own corset to the pile, then lay very still until she heard Edward settle inside his tent. It was cold now, she pulled her blanket tighter round her shoulders.

  She had almost fallen asleep when Edward’s unthinkable words suddenly shouted in her head, he could be on the next ship, and she sat bolt upright. Suddenly the little house seemed so full of hauntings and terror that she gasped aloud, buried her face in a cushion so that the others would not hear. It was so long since she had felt that terror: she had thought it was over but suddenly they were back, the old panic and the fear and the secret disgust that made the blood drain from her face, ain’t you done it, don’t you miss it, these things that she had thought, on board the Amaryllis, that she had defeated. Then the unpleasant vision of the soft-footed Peters flashed again into her mind, like a punishment and a warning: for it was Peters that her father would send. She could not imagine, could not conceive that Sir Charles Cooper would sail across the sea, she simply could not think it. She did not know how long she lay there, almost paralysed with panic and fear and the terrible loud beating of her heart: I will have to go away from here; I must not be found; Peters must not find me, I will have to go away tomorrow. And suddenly into her mind came the oak tree, the one oak tree in Bryanston Square. Some time towards morning, she slept.

  * * *

  Next morning they found clear cold blue skies and the sun coming up from behind the high hills. Edward had already gone up the hill with his axes and his dog: they could hear the echo of the axe falling against wood as they performed their ablutions; they could hear it still as the three of them contemplated again the raw meat. All three of them looked at their surroundings with some suspicion: in daylight it clearly was not a farm, and who knew what lurked in the bushes. Miss Eunice seemed much recovered but at a loss as to how to proceed; Hetty’s face was haggard with pain but still she said: ‘I think we should wash Mr Edward’s biggest pan and put that meat stuff in and put water in it and put it on the fire. It will cook that way. That’s how people cook. That’s how me mum cooked potaters.’ She tried to help to lift the big, dirty pot, her face twisted with pain. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry, Miss Harriet, as soon as me arm recovers I’ll do it all.’

  Nobody had a better plan: Miss Eunice and Harriet between them, with much distaste but much determination, scrubbed at the pot. I must go. I must go today.

  Hetty would have laughed at the gentlewomen working if she had not been in such pain; suddenly, they swam before her eyes as they filled the pot with bones and flesh of they knew not what animal and put it on to the fire that Edward had lit again when he woke. When Harriet looked round for further instructions from Hetty, Hetty had fainted. In alarm, they lifted her on to the bed, she cried out over and over again with pain but saying also, ‘I’m sorry, Miss Harriet, I knocked it again when I tried to lift the pot, I’m sorry for this trouble.’

  ‘Run for Edward,’ Harriet instructed Miss Eunice, and then could not help smiling at the sight of the sober brown dress hurrying upwards with ungainly steps and falling often into the green bushes, calling, ‘Mr Cooper! Mr Cooper!’ She bathed Hetty’s face, trying to calm her, told her, not meaning it unkindly, that Miss Eunice looked like a sprightly mountain goat.

  ‘That Miss Eunice,’ said Hetty weakly, tears of pain still running down her face, ‘would turn herself into a sprightly mountain tiger python if anyone got in the way of her plans for Mr Edward.’

  Harriet laughed. ‘Mr Edward,’ she said, ‘is quite able to look after himself. He is a very stubborn man.’

  Edward came back with Miss Eunice; they were both carrying water from the spring. Miss Eunice was carrying almost as much as Edward: once again Harriet felt her original opinion of the older woman alter. Edward looked at Hetty’s face, rummaged in one of his boxes from England, came back to where she was lying on his bed. He was carrying his old school cricket bat, a child’s cricket bat. Despite her protests he gently took her arm; it moved and crunched to his probing and Hetty gave a
scream which she tried to contain.

  ‘Hetty,’ said Edward firmly, ‘it will only get worse if we leave it. The arm absolutely must be re-set. I am so afraid it is poisoned inside. I know—’ as she protested, ‘I am not a doctor, but something must be done, otherwise we need to take you back to Wellington and I think the journey would be very difficult for you. It can only get worse if we leave it. I’ve done things like this on the farm if you will trust me.’

  ‘I ain’t a cow,’ said Hetty faintly.

  ‘We could use the cricket bat as a splint,’ he continued. ‘The arm must be pulled out and set correctly for you to be able to use it again. And then I could put the whole thing, your arm and the cricket bat, into a big sling in one of my shirts. And my father gave me his best whisky, look! That would help.’

  Hetty looked at the cricket bat, at Edward, at the whisky. The other two women looked troubled at Edward’s bizarre plan: neither of them thought it wise for Hetty to agree. The sun shone in through the door and they could hear birds, and the gentle sea below. Hetty made a sudden lunge for the whisky, gulped down enough to have made the strongest English gentleman buckle.

  ‘Do it,’ she said, ‘quick!’ and then screamed and screamed as Edward did: pulled it and heard a sound of bone, straightened it and tied it to the cricket bat, remembering how he’d saved his dog.

  Harriet, staring at the sea, frightened that they may have damaged Hetty further, told herself she could not think about leaving until Hetty improved; she must take Hetty with her. Miss Eunice, taking her turn at bathing Hetty’s face, thought she had never seen such a heroic man as Edward in her life and almost wished it was her own arm that had been broken. Edward looked very pale at his temerity and he stared at Hetty, seemed not to be able to take his eyes off her as she lay, so unlikely, on his bed. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have tried,’ he said several times. ‘We should have taken her back to Wellington.’