Hearts in the Land of Ferns

by Jude Knight

  Both women looked up, holding their breath. “I’m going to get out some of the old hurricane lamps,” Cheryl said, “while we still have power. We should save the generator for the things we can’t do without it.”

  She caught up the bucket with the kitchen scraps. “I’ll feed the pigs and lock up the hens while I’m at it.”

  “I can do that,” Lee said, but Cheryl told her to sit and relax. “No point in both of us going out in this rain. We’ve done all we can, so just sit and relax for a while.”

  Lee sat at the table and began to count up the money from the fair. The stall fees were already banked, and some of the competition fees had been paid in advance, but now she could add the takings for the day. She worked her way through the bag from each attraction, counting the number of coins or notes in each denomination, putting them into the separate cash bags supplied by the bank, and writing the totals on her list.

  Absorbed, she didn’t notice how long Cheryl had been gone, until the lights went out again, leaving her in full dark.

  She felt for the powerful torch kept plugged into its wall charger near the door and sighed with relief when she found it. By its light, she pulled on an all-weather coat and boots, and wrestled the door open against the wind, which wanted to snatch it out of her hands.

  The torch shone a beam through driving, gusting rain. Already, the yard between the house and its sheds was a sea, inches deep and alive with tiny scudding waves. Carefully, leaning into the wind, feeling for each step before she took it, she crossed the yard towards the shed with the door that was wildly swinging in the wind, banging open and shut, open and shut.

  Cheryl was inside, white-faced, sitting on the floor with her back to the bench. She had mud all down one side, from her bruised face to her boots. “Careful,” she said. “I broke one of the lamps when I fell. Watch out for glass.”

  “Are you okay? What happened?”

  “Slipped in the mud and went down with a crash. Hit my head on something, too. But the ankle is the worst. I don’t think it’s broken, but I can’t put my weight on it. I was trying to think of something I could lean on to get inside.”

  “Me,” Lee said, and they made their careful way back across the yard, Cheryl with her arm over Lee’s shoulders, step, hop, step, hop, step, hop, until Cheryl was safely inside. “I’ll have to get the hurricane lamps so I can see to bandage your ankle,” Lee said once she had Cheryl settled in the chair in the dining nook, sitting on a towel because she’d shuffled into the shed on her behind, and the jeans showed it.

  The same careful progress, even more cautiously this time, since the wind was howling with an extra fury. And back again, the shed door firmly secured, with the three remaining lanterns and the bottle of kerosene.

  Even after she was out of the wind again, it worried her. Each gust buffeted the house, and the roof creaked with each wild blow. “Will it hold?” Lee asked, anxiously. “Should we get in the storm cellar?”

  Cheryl, absorbed in lighting the lamps, answered shortly, “No storm cellars. And the roof will hold. It is rated for a hurricane. This is just a gale. Didn’t Trevor tell you about Rangitikei weather? He should have before he asked you to marry him and come to live here.”

  That wasn’t the bargain, Lee thought. He’d given her a choice, there in the bush hut after they had made love, and marriage hadn’t been included in either of the options.

  “I’m going back to Pritchard in the morning,” he said, “to finish the job I started. Your evidence will help, but we have to sew him up so tight not all the high-priced lawyers in the world will be able to winkle him out.”

  He was sitting in a chair beside the bed where she half sat, half lay, and he leaned forward to squeeze her hand. “I can suggest two ways to get you to a secure hiding place. The first will be safer for you. The second will help me to convince Pritchard I’m on his side. But the choice has to be yours.”

  “Tell me,” Lee said, and he did. If she stayed where she was, in the bush hut, a friend of his would come to collect her and take her to a safe hiding place. If she went with Trevor, he would tell Bernard that she had panicked but now saw the benefits of keeping her mouth shut so she could enjoy the lifestyle for which Bernard’s activities paid.

  And in the end, she agreed with the second option, riding out with him to Silverdale where he bought clothing for them both, then down the motorway to Auckland’s central business district, where he parked the motorcycle, boldly, in the customer car park and led her by the hand to the executive lifts.

  They stripped off their motorbike gear in the lifts, and by the time they reached the thirty-second floor, a bristling Bernard waited, surrounded by security guards.

  Before the lift door was properly open, Jason took the initiative, reaching Shay in two angry strides, shouting as he grabbed the man by the neck and shook. “Don’t you ever talk to people before you start shooting? And how many of my men did you have to abandon to the New Zealand Police? Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t beat you to a pulp before I fire your ass. You damn near killed the boss’s sister, you cretin.”

  Lee could see Bernard rapidly reassessing while the rest of the goons took a step back and Shay tried to argue while choking.

  “Bernard, I’m sorry for all the trouble,” she said. “I was such a little fool.”

  There was more shouting, and lots of questions, but in the end, Bernard bought the story. “But you’ll marry her,” he said to Jason. “You can’t tell me you didn’t shag her, and I need someone to keep her under control. She’s spoilt. I’ve indulged her too much. Tame her, Jason.”

  Jason took Lee’s hand and lifted it to his lips; said it would be a pleasure. And three days later—days during which she was kept in her apartment and allowed no visitors except Jason and Bernard—she and Jason walked over to the Registry Office and were wed, with Bernard and a girl from the office as their witnesses.

  At Jason’s whispered suggestion, she had begged for a week’s honeymoon. Jason argued that she had already mucked up his work schedule, but Bernard had just signed a major deal and was feeling expansive. “Take a week, Jase,” he said. “Tell you what. Fly to Sydney and deliver the hard-copy papers. Then show Kirilee the sights.”

  So, a taxi took them from the Registry Office to the airport, and Kirilee was spirited away from the airport by a woman who approached her with the magic of the name, Trevor Greenshaw.

  And here she was, not quite nine months later, helping her sister-in-law wash off mud by the light of a kerosene-fuelled lamp.

  Cheryl was soon clean and in dry pyjamas and robe, her scrapes washed and dismissed. The ankle was the worst of it; that and a decided knob on her forehead where she had hit her head. Lee gave her a packet of frozen peas wrapped in a tea towel to hold to the lump while she wrapped the ankle tightly in a support bandage.

  “I think it is just a sprain. I’ll get some ice for that, too. You stay here and keep it up.”

  She straightened for a moment, as the dull ache in the back sharpened, conscious suddenly that her abdomen was as hard as a rock. Not tonight! The baby couldn’t be coming tonight.

  As the contraction passed, in one of the brief lulls in the wind, she heard the sound of a motor getting closer, and as the wind drowned it again, headlights showed through the window at the road end of the room, the light sweeping along the wall as whoever it was pulled up outside.

  Lee went to open the door to the porch, hesitating when she heard the new arrival let himself in the outside door, and slam it shut against the wind.

  “Who is there?” she shouted.

  “Trevor. I’m home.”

  At the voice that had been soothing her dreams for months, she wrenched the door open, stopping in the doorway. He was hanging up a heavy all-weather coat and still wearing the leggings and boots. A motorcycle safety helmet lay discarded on the bench next to a hiker’s day pack. He quirked one side of his lips in an uncertain smile, his eyes sliding from her face down to her swollen abdo
men.

  “Kirilee,” he said, the familiar voice warm with wonder. “Kirilee… Look, give me a minute to get out of these, would you? How are you? How are Granddad and Cheryl?”

  Cheryl shouted from the far end of the room. “Trevor? Lee, is it Trevor?”

  “Don’t try to get up,” Lee scolded. “He’ll come to you.”

  She left the door open and returned to Cheryl, and moments later Trevor joined them.

  “What have you been doing to yourself, Cheryl?”

  He bent to give his sister’s cheek a kiss, and she grabbed and hugged him, her questions tumbling over themselves? “Trevor, where did you come from? How did you get here? Why didn’t you phone? Are the roads still open? Are you finished? Did you get your man? How long can you stay? Did you know about the baby? Oh, it’s so good to see you!”

  “Borrowed a quaddie from Kev down below. The roads are a mess, but I had to be home for Christmas. I thought I’d surprise you, but you turned the tables on me, for sure.”

  He grinned up from his perch on the arm of Cheryl’s chair and pulled Lee by the hand until he could wrap an arm around her so that he was hugging her on one side and Cheryl on the other.

  “When Kev told me, it was the first I knew. Are you okay, Kirilee? Shouldn’t you be sitting down? Are you keeping well? Is it a boy or a girl?”

  Lee relaxed into his hug for a moment, then shifted to resist and he let her go.

  “I’ll put the kettle on.” The ubiquitous Kiwi cup of tea, answer to every crisis and awkward moment.

  Trevor scrambled to his feet. “No, I’ll do it. You sit down. Shouldn’t you have your feet up?”

  Lee would have argued, but another contraction absorbed her attention. Stronger. Not a pain, exactly. More a clenching. She should start timing them, but the electric clock on the wall had stopped, of course.

  “Have you got a watch, Trevor?” she asked, and looked up to see brother and sister looking back, with equally anxious expressions.

  “Is it the baby?” Cheryl asked.

  “It’s too early,” Trevor protested, frowning. “Isn’t it?”

  Lee shrugged. “Could be a false alarm. Due date is ten days.”

  “But the midwife said a fortnight either side is normal,” Cheryl reminded her. She laughed, an unamused huff with a wry twist of the lips. “Quite a homecoming for you, brother. Worst storm in a decade, Granddad under the weather, me out of action, and now the baby.”

  Trevor’s eyes were round with incipient panic. “I don’t know what to do. It won’t come now, will it?”

  “It’s probably a false alarm,” Lee assured him. And as she said that she felt a popping sensation deep in her pelvis, and warm liquid gushed down her legs. Her waters had broken.

  10

  They sat up for another hour, during which Trevor cleaned the floor, checked on Grandad (who was sleeping, but breathing normally) and borrowed Granddad’s watch from the top of his chest of drawers. Trevor also had a shower, grateful for the piping in back of the wood-fired stove, that heated the gravity-fed water supply.

  Trevor didn’t want to talk about his three years away, except to reassure Lee that the job was done, and Cheryl that he was finished with undercover work. Kirilee received without comment the news that her brother had died in the final confrontation, and both women accepted his promise to talk about it later. Instead, they took turns in catching him up with the local news, vying with one another to make him laugh.

  He was torn between feeling excluded by their obvious affection for one another, and warm satisfaction that Kirilee belonged in this place he loved best in all the world.

  Kirilee had four more contractions, each one stopping the conversation while Trevor and Cheryl waited for her to report. “I am fine,” she kept insisting. In the end, she told them to go to bed. “I’m going to get some sleep while I can. Looks like I’ll have work to do tomorrow.”

  Trevor helped Cheryl to bed, checked on Old Trev again, and used his assigned torch to search the bookshelves that lined one wall of the sitting room for the old Household Medical Manual, which he took to his bedroom. He’d once had a brief lesson in assisting at a childbirth. A decade ago. Something about keeping everything clean and saving the afterbirth.

  He’d delivered any number of lambs, and even helped Tamati a time or two with larger animals, but people were different. His own wife and baby were different.

  He’d forgotten how pretty she was, even prettier to him now, round with his child, her eyes softly glowing in the light of the kerosene lantern. Without makeup, her hair uncut since he last saw her and hanging loose to dry over her shoulders, her belly rounded with his child, she brought the kind of lump to his throat he associated with an exceptional sunset or a deeply moving poem.

  He smiled mistily at the unopened book on his knees, then set himself to find the instructions for childbirth.

  “When labour is about to commence,” the book said, “the woman usually experiences some agitation of the nervous system…”

  Rubbish. Lee was the calmest of the three of them. “… the womb settles down lower, the genital organs become relaxed and moist…” he wasn’t going to ask her about that, “… a frequent diarrhoea comes on, and there are frequent calls to make water.” He winced, but persisted.

  The stages of labour. Something about the opening of the inner and outer doors. A glowing recommendation for the use of chloroform.

  He checked the publication date. 1883. Damn.

  Now. This might be helpful. Preparing the bed. But no, Lee had told him she had the big back bedroom all ready, with all the kit she’d need clean and sealed in plastic bags.

  “She need not lie down at the beginning of labour, unless she chooses…” She chose to sit on one of those big round balls they used in gyms, and to kneel behind it, resting over it, too. He’d have to follow her lead on that one.

  The book went on to describe a salt enema and breaking the membrane to let the waters gush out. Trevor shuddered.

  “In an ordinary labour, besides encouraging and cheering the patient, there will be nothing further for him to do until the head presses against the perineum.” Okay. Encouraging and cheering. He could do encouraging and cheering.

  Though he was not much cheered himself, as the book went on to describe what to do if the baby didn’t breathe, or the afterbirth didn’t deliver. And the words ‘in an ordinary labour’ echoed in his head as he put the book aside and turned off the torch.

  There was no way he was going to sleep with all that going on. He lay in the dark and listened to the storm, and at some point, lost touch with his consciousness.

  He woke all of a sudden, jerking out of a dream that slipped from his memory as fast as he clutched after it. Something about fleeing gunmen, and Kirilee in labour as they ran.

  He took a deep breath to calm his racing heart. The storm was worse than ever, the rain in an endless torrent, the wind buffeting the house. They’d be on their own if the baby arrived in the next few hours. On that thought, he grabbed his torch and padded out to check the time on the old cuckoo clock in the little-used front hall, but he turned the other way when he saw a light on in the kitchen.

  Lee was sitting on her exercise ball in the dining nook, sipping from a mug. “Kettle’s hot,” she told him.

  She looked calm; a lot calmer than he felt. “Are you okay?”

  “Fine.” She waved to the watch that sat on the table. “I’m trying not to time every contraction. I keep telling myself they’re not getting stronger or closer, but then I want to check and find out if they are. Couldn’t you sleep?”

  Trevor put a tea bag in a mug and filled it from the kettle. “Like a log, but now I’m wide awake. Do you mind the company?”

  “I’d like it. We should talk.”

  “About us, you mean?” He turned a chair from the table so he could face her over its back.

  “Is there an us? I know we — you know.” She looked down at her swollen abdomen. “But the weddi
ng was all about saving my life. I know that. And it wasn’t real, was it? You aren’t him. Jason, I mean. I keep wanting to call you ‘Jason’. But you’re Trevor, and next week or next month I guess you’ll be someone else.”

  Trevor sipped his tea to buy time while he thought about which of her assumptions and unspoken questions to start with. “There could be an us. Maybe there should be. A baby needs a family, and it seems to me you and Cheryl and Granddad…”

  “They think I’m your wife.”

  “You are my wife. We can probably get the marriage annulled, if that’s what you want, but by New Zealand law, an error on the license doesn’t mean we’re not married, right now, this minute.”

  “Isn’t an annulment what you want?”

  He took another slow meditative sip. “What I want. Here’s the thing, Kirilee. The thought of you, safe in Mangatehapu, has kept me sane for months, but I couldn’t imagine how you were getting on. A woman like you, used to the best of everything. I thought you must hate it, and I love it, Kirilee. I want to come home. I want to stay. I can’t do the undercover stuff anymore. I want to be a rural cop in a community where I know everyone and everyone knows me. I want to be Trevor Greenshaw, grandson of Trevor Greenshaw. The one who went around the world and came home again.”

  Now it was her turn to hide her face by sipping from her cup. “It’s a wonderful place,” she said. “And Old Trev will be over the moon to have you home.”

  He might as well finish the rest of it. “At night, when I was alone and could be myself, I thought about a wife and family, and the wife always had your face. But I thought you’d never want to stay. Then on the way home, after we closed down your brother’s operation, I checked up on Cheryl’s social media and there you were. ‘My sister’, she called you, and pictures of your hands feeding a lamb and making marmalade and knitting. You don’t hate it here, do you?”

  “I love it here,” Kirilee said, and then her eyes unfocused and she lifted her chin, breathing in and out with steady deliberation.