Kitty

by Challinor, Deborah

  ‘It won’t! I could teach here, Mama, I could sew! Please, don’t send me away!’

  Emily shook her head resolutely, blinking hard. ‘You’re better to go off to New Zealand, away from gossip and long memories.’

  ‘But Mama—’

  ‘No, Kitty, I’ve made up my mind.’

  Kitty burst into tears, followed closely by Emily, who moved closer and wrapped her arms around her sobbing daughter.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Kitty, but there’s nothing else to be done. You’re a good girl, you always were, if rather headstrong, but you’ve made a terrible mistake. Your chances of a good life here have gone, don’t you see that?’

  Kitty was helpless to stop her tears, because she couldn’t see it, not at all.

  Chapter Four

  Paihia

  Breakfast was a rowdy affair, with the Purcell children joining in. Five of them sat along one side of the table, from the eldest to the youngest, like a graduated row of Russian dolls Kitty had once seen. The baby, Harry, was perched on his mother’s knee, waving a spoon and flicking porridge everywhere. Next to Rebecca sat Uncle George, and on his right was Aunt Sarah, the only gloomy notes in an otherwise loud and lively tableau.

  ‘We will be moving into the vacant house this morning, Kitty,’ George said, parsimoniously spreading bright yellow butter on a slice of bread. ‘I trust you will have your things ready to be carried over by ten o’clock? On the dot, please.’

  Kitty nodded, her mouth full of porridge.

  ‘Unfortunately, I won’t be available to help,’ George went on. ‘Mr Purcell and Mr Tait and I will be meeting with Reverend Williams this morning. But Mr Purcell assures me there will be more than enough Maoris to assist you.’

  ‘Just keep an eye on everything, that’s all,’ Win said, helping himself to extra porridge. ‘They can be a bit light-fingered.’

  At first Kitty had been daunted by the sight of the dozen Maori men and boys who arrived from Pukera village on the dot of a quarter past eleven to help with the move. She was especially alarmed to see that Haunui was among them.

  Looking contrite, he said solemnly, ‘I am sorry for drowning you, Miss Kitty,’ and extended his huge brown hand.

  Kitty eyed it nervously, then shook it, wondering how he knew her name. ‘And I am sorry for hitting you, Mr Haunui.’

  He grinned then, the wide smile transforming his fierce face. ‘Not mister, just Haunui.’

  Sarah left her seat in the shade of the verandah, briskly clapped her hands three times and commanded, ‘Pay attention, please!’

  The Maoris looked at each other in puzzlement, then clapped their own hands three times.

  Kitty burst out laughing. Rebecca, her hand over her mouth, said quietly to Sarah, ‘When you want them to do something, it’s better if you ask them in a more, well, conversational manner. They don’t particularly care for taking orders, but they do like to help.’

  ‘Oh,’ Sarah said, blushing beneath the deep brim of her bonnet. She drew a breath for another attempt. ‘I wonder if you gentlemen would assist us to carry our belongings to our new house? We would be very grateful if you could.’

  ‘Ah,’ the Maoris breathed, nodding in satisfaction at each other. Haunui barked, ‘Tangohia enei mea!’ and they bent to pick up the pile of trunks and smaller bags piled on the verandah.

  They led the way along the beach, their bare feet leaving deep prints in the coarse sand. Rebecca pointed out the small wooden church and then the Williams’s home, a pretty, two-storeyed house built in two distinct parts from lathe and plaster, surrounded by neat and colourful flower gardens.

  Sited at the western end of the little settlement, at the furthest end of the beach, the vacant house stood in front of a group of the enormous red-cloaked trees Kitty had seen from the deck of the Swordfish yesterday morning. This house was also two-storeyed, and had a verandah running along the front and halfway along each side. The roof was hipped, yet still low-pitched, with three chimneys, and three dormer windows at the front and two at the rear. Trailing behind Sarah, Kitty saw that, like Rebecca’s house, this one also had a skillion added on to the back, containing two small, partially furnished bedrooms, although this addition looked almost new and the bare boards still smelled of resin. The grounds were laid out in gardens, which had no doubt been neat and tidy at some point but were somewhat overgrown now. Kitty noted foxgloves, geraniums, lupins and roses growing rampantly—all flowers she knew well from home—and some big, brightly coloured blooms on a vigorous bush she couldn’t name.

  ‘Who built the house?’ she wondered aloud.

  ‘The Maoris Frederick Tait has been training,’ Rebecca replied. ‘Clever, aren’t they? Would you like to go inside now?’

  Kitty and Sarah followed her into the cool dimness, the low verandahs blocking off a good amount of the sunlight. Kitty suspected it might be cold in winter.

  The front door opened on to a short central hall, at the end of which was a flight of narrow stairs that doubled back on itself. A woven flax mat covered the floor, sand and dirt collecting around its edges. Two doorways opened off the hall: the room on the left appeared to be the parlour, while the one on the right was a dining room, already furnished with an enormous sideboard and another flax mat. The walls in both rooms were painted a fresh white.

  ‘How fortunate,’ Sarah said, eyeing the beautifully carved and constructed sideboard, pleased because she and George hadn’t had the money to bring out their larger pieces of furniture.

  ‘That was Mrs Chambers’s favourite,’ Rebecca said. ‘Her husband had it made when they arrived, but it was too big to take home with them.’

  The kitchen was through the dining room. One wall made almost entirely of bricks contained a fireplace nearly as tall as Kitty, with a heavy iron bracket suspended over the fire to hold pots, and a bread oven set into the bricks to one side. A bellows rested against the hearth, but it seemed the Chambers family had taken their pots and pans home. Sarah’s eyes gleamed—it wasn’t quite the kitchen she’d presided over in Norfolk, but it would certainly be adequate.

  There were smaller fireplaces in the dining room and the parlour, which also contained a set of built-in shelves and two shabby armchairs. The room looked dusty and unlived-in and the windows were dull with sea spray, but Sarah declared that a liberal application of elbow grease would soon have it right. Kitty was pleased for her aunt, whom she was sure had been convinced that they really would have to live in a tent for an unspecified, but no doubt extended, period of time.

  Upstairs were a small landing and three more rooms. Kitty followed Sarah into the largest.

  ‘Your uncle and I will take this one,’ Sarah said. ‘And I expect your uncle will want the one next door for his study.’

  Kitty left her there, stepped across the landing, and opened the door to the third room. It was a reasonable size even though the roof sloped on both sides and the chimney from the parlour below took up much of one wall. It certainly wasn’t as tiny as the room she’d slept in last night. There were two windows: one facing the sea and the other offering a view of the overgrown kitchen garden behind the house and the privy beyond it.

  She sat down on the single bed, which creaked and sagged under her weight. There was a solid set of drawers in the room but nothing else in the way of furniture, not even a rail she could hang her dresses on.

  She jumped up again when Haunui appeared with her trunk balanced on his massive shoulder, grimacing as he inadvertently banged it against the door frame.

  ‘Where?’ he said.

  ‘Anywhere will do, thank you,’ Kitty said, watching his muscles flex as he heaved the trunk off his shoulder and lowered it to the bare floorboards with a bang.

  He straightened up and looked curiously around. ‘Not very pretty,’ he said as he went out.

  Kitty blushed, wondering whether he meant the room or her. She sat on the bed again. Absently watching the progress of a small grey spider as it crawled across the wall, she decided
that with some fresh new curtains, a bright rug on the floor, and her white linen on the bed, she could probably make the room reasonably cosy.

  It wasn’t her bedroom at home in Norfolk, though.

  Downstairs the Maori helpers were carting in more trunks and furniture, laughing and calling out to each other in their own tongue.

  Behind them, Rebecca’s children waited patiently, all carrying something to be moved into the house. Even Grace, the three-year-old, was clutching Aunt Sarah’s cap basket, although the sand caked on the bottom indicated that it had been dropped several times on the way.

  There was a moment of concern when it was noticed that Sarah’s spinning wheel had disappeared, but the mystery was solved when it was discovered sitting on the beach, the incoming tide just beginning to lap around its base. The boy charged with transporting it had apparently decided it was too awkward to carry.

  By half past two everything had been shifted into the house, unpacked and put more or less where Sarah wanted it to go. The only thing that Kitty couldn’t find was her wide-brimmed straw sunhat. When the helpers were ready to depart, however, she finally spied it, balanced absurdly on Haunui’s big head. For a moment she considered asking for it back, but decided it was probably fair compensation for having hit him so hard yesterday. She waved at him instead, and smiled when he nodded his head in acknowledgement of the trade and then winked.

  There were also several other items missing, according to Sarah—a candle mould, a set of George’s linen handkerchiefs with his initials embroidered in one corner, a box of lavender-scented soap given as a farewell gift by a Dereham parishioner, an Oriental parasol, and a silver and glass cruet set—but for diplomacy’s sake nothing was said.

  While Kitty and Sarah were unpacking, Rebecca had gone home to prepare a picnic. Kitty found a tablecloth and spread it out on the long grass in the shade of a tree. There was no tea to drink because no one had chopped wood for the fire yet, but Rebecca had bought several bottles of lemonade, which was almost as refreshing.

  It was very hot, even in the shade. The children had taken off their shoes and stockings and stripped down to as few garments as Rebecca would allow, but were still complaining about the heat. Harry, who had become very pink and grizzly, was clad in nothing but a sagging napkin; Kitty watched as Grace trickled small handfuls of dirt down the back of it.

  ‘Don’t do that, dear,’ Rebecca said mildly. ‘Albert, why don’t you take your brother and sisters down to the beach for a paddle? Only up to your knees, mind.’

  Albert leapt up, eager to do anything that didn’t involve helping to tidy the picnic things.

  When the children had charged off, leaving a screaming Harry behind because he was too little to go, Rebecca said to Sarah, ‘Mrs Williams called in while I was getting the picnic ready and asked me to tell you that your two new housegirls will be arriving later this afternoon. She said she was sorry she couldn’t tell you herself but she’s very busy getting Reverend Williams’s things ready for his trip, and she’ll come by tonight to make sure you’re comfortably settled.’

  ‘I think we will be very comfortable here,’ Sarah replied. ‘And I’m more than happy to begin my work with the girls immediately.’

  Rebecca began to collect plates and cutlery. ‘Actually, one of them is rather special. She’s Tupehu’s youngest daughter.’

  ‘Who?’ Sarah said. She was getting very confused with all these strange native names.

  ‘Tupehu is the local chief. You haven’t met him yet.’

  ‘Really?’ Sarah said. ‘To what do we owe that honour?’

  ‘Well, he originally wanted Mrs Williams to school her, because Mrs Williams is the wife of a “proper reverend”, but she has seven girls at the moment, and her own children, and is quite frankly rushed off her feet. Tupehu, who is a very forceful man, as I’m sure you’ll realise when you meet him, insisted that nothing less would do for his daughter, so he was very pleased when Mrs Williams told him a few months ago that you and Reverend Kelleher were on your way out.’ Rebecca looked faintly apologetic. ‘He was asked to wait for a week until you had settled in, but he was very insistent that his daughter come here today. So I’ve brought some spare linen back for the beds. I hope it doesn’t inconvenience you, Mrs Kelleher, but Tupehu is our benefactor and we’ve found that it does pay to humour him. They can be very sensitive at times, the Maoris, and perceived slights can give rise to the most dreadful problems.’

  ‘I’m sure it won’t be an inconvenience, Mrs Purcell. We’ll manage, won’t we, Kitty?’

  Kitty nodded, her interest aroused by the prospect of what the daughter of a Maori chief might be like.

  She didn’t have to wait long to find out. She and Sarah were making up the beds in the two back rooms downstairs, when Albert excitedly announced that Tupehu and his party had arrived.

  There was a distinct air of ceremony about the group of twenty or so Maoris gathered in the front garden. At the fore was a tall, imperious-looking figure, and Kitty wasn’t at all surprised to see that it was the man she had noticed yesterday standing in the waka. He wore dark trousers, a white linen shirt and, in spite of the heat, a most beautiful feathered cloak; his dusty brown feet were bare. His hair was drawn up in a topknot, and heavy carvings of bone hung from each pendulous ear. It was his face, however, that demanded attention. If his brother Haunui was ugly, Kitty thought, then Tupehu was positively hideous. His nose was large and hooked, his lips and brows prominent, and his scowling features marked from hairline to bushy black beard with a complex pattern of sweeping lines and spirals. Where his right eye should have been there was nothing but a twisted mass of scar tissue. He waited, motionless and menacing.

  Rebecca stepped forward. ‘Good afternoon, Tupehu. Welcome to Reverend and Mrs Kelleher’s new home, which will also be your daughter’s home.’ She drew Sarah forward. ‘This is Mrs Kelleher, who will be schooling your daughter.’

  Tupehu inclined his head slightly. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said, his voice deep and surprisingly mellifluous. ‘Where is the minita?’

  ‘Reverend Kelleher is attending meetings today,’ Sarah said, her voice only slightly betraying her trepidation. ‘Were you hoping to meet him?’

  ‘Ae,’ Tupehu said, the feathers in his topknot bobbing as he nodded.

  ‘Perhaps you could come back later this evening? I’m sure he will be home by then.’

  Another pause. ‘Perhaps.’

  A silence descended.

  Finally, Rebecca said, ‘Your daughter is with you?’

  ‘Ae.’ Tupehu turned and snapped, ‘Haere mai korua.’

  There was much shuffling and jostling as the group parted and two girls moved up. The taller of the pair stepped forward.

  ‘This is Amiria, my iramutu,’ Tupehu said.

  Sarah glanced uncertainly at Rebecca, who whispered, ‘Niece.’

  Amiria was a big girl, full-figured and sturdy. Her dark wiry hair fell free, its heaviness matched by brows arched over shrewd, slanted eyes, giving her a distinctly impish look. She wore a blue and brown striped skirt and a cream bodice, straining across her considerable bust. Her feet were bare.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ Amiria said, and smiled, revealing very good, white teeth.

  ‘Good afternoon, Amee-di…’ Sarah struggled with the pro-nunciation.

  Amiria said her name slowly. ‘A-mi-ri-a.’

  ‘Amee-di…’

  ‘No,’ Amiria said, ‘A-mi-ri-a.’

  Rebecca, anxious that no offence should be taken over the mispronunciation of Amiria’s name, said hastily, ‘Would you mind if Mrs Kelleher called you Amy? Just until she becomes accustomed to your native tongue?’

  Amiria put her head on one side and thought about it, then smiled again. ‘Amy. I like it.’

  Tupehu nodded his approval. ‘This is my daughter, Wai.’

  The other girl came forward. She was smaller than her cousin, by several inches and at least a stone in weight. Her skin was the colour of carame
l, her black hair tumbled to her neat waist, and she looked nothing like her father. Kitty thought she was rather lovely, in fact, with huge dark eyes, a wide but short nose, and full, beautifully defined lips.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Kereha.’

  ‘Good afternoon, Wai,’ Sarah said, managing to get this name right and not minding that Wai hadn’t quite done the same with hers. ‘Wai and Amy, I would like you to meet my niece, Miss Kitty Carlisle. Kitty will be helping me at home and teaching the children at the mission school. Kitty, why don’t you show the girls their rooms?’

  Kitty turned to lead Wai and Amy into the house, but before she could, Tupehu caused her to jump almost out of her skin by barking, ‘Stop! Listen!’

  He then proceeded to rattle off in Maori what sounded like a barrage of instructions, commands and warnings to the two girls, who stood with heads bowed and their hair falling across their faces. Then, when he had finally finished, he turned to go, gesturing grandly at his entourage to follow. As he departed through the garden gate, someone gave a very muffled giggle; Kitty thought it might have been Amy.

  The girls collected their kits and followed her inside.

  ‘I’m afraid we can’t offer you tea,’ Sarah said, ‘as we don’t yet have any firewood for the hearth.’

  Wai shrugged and Amy didn’t appear to be listening anyway, too busy gazing at herself in the framed mirror Sarah had only just hung on the hall wall.

  ‘Shall I send Albert home to bring back some wood on the handcart?’ Rebecca suggested to Sarah. ‘Then perhaps Win can organise a supply for you later this evening. You really can’t do without tea.’

  Kitty led the girls out through the back door and around to the bedrooms at the rear of the house. Unlike the skillion rooms in the Purcell home, neither of these could be accessed from inside. She opened the door to the nearest and asked cheerfully, ‘Who would like this one?’

  Wai and Amy regarded the narrow bed, the single chest of drawers and the bare floor in silence.

  Amy said, ‘What is the other room like?’