Amber (2 page)

‘He’s a tugboat captain,’ Emily said.

Nellie’s face fell. ‘Oh, is he?’

‘No, but I wanted to wipe that silly look off your face. This isn’t a Jane Austen novel, Nellie, this is my daughter we’re talking about!’

Chastened, Nellie stuck another piece of shortbread in her mouth.

‘She has asked to be married here, in this house,’ Emily said. She didn’t add that it had always been her dream to see Kitty walk down the aisle of one of the larger churches in Norwich, perhaps even one of the cathedrals, although in all honesty there would never be the money to pay for an event of that magnitude.

‘But that will be nice, won’t it?’ Nellie insisted. ‘The vicar does a lovely service and the spring flowers will all be out by then.’

‘Yes, but I wanted…’ Emily trailed off. One of the things she had been most looking forward to was the proud expression on her husband’s face as he escorted Kitty down the aisle, but Lewis had been in his grave for over three years now. She sighed again. ‘Yes, the vicar does do a lovely service. I’ll have to go over and see him tomorrow.’

Later that day, Emily went upstairs to the attic and opened the trunk in which was stored her wedding gown. She carried it—still wrapped in tissue and undyed calico to stop it from spoiling—down to her bedroom and laid it across the bed she had once shared with Lewis. Carefully, she opened the layers until the dress was revealed.

It was of figured muslin in a deep ivory, with copper-coloured silk trim and cording around the low scoop neck and at the cuffs of the short puffed sleeves. A matching silk sash ran across the high waistline and tied at the back, and copper-coloured glass beads embroidered around the hem formed a subtle but very pretty design. In the afternoon light filtering through the gauze curtains at the bedroom windows, the copper silk gleamed dully. There was also a pair of matching satin slippers, which Emily already knew would not fit Kitty because Kitty had rather long feet for such a slender girl. On her own wedding day, Emily had worn her hair up, with her mother’s pale pearls wound through the strands, pearls that were now carefully stored in her jewellery case.

Unconsciously twisting her onyx mourning ring, Emily gazed down at the dress spread across the white counterpane, tears threatening as she remembered how happy she had been the day she and Lewis had wed, and how that happiness had carried on unabated until he had died so unexpectedly. They had married in June of 1815, just after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. Napoleon had been exiled to St Helena after that, and these days Emily felt as though she had been exiled as well, to a life without Lewis and
therefore without love. All she had left was Kitty, and it seemed that despite her best intentions, and possibly even because of them, she was losing her now, too.

As a mother, it was her duty to forbid Kitty to marry someone whom she, Emily, had not even met, and especially a man so amoral that he had evidently consented to allow, if he had not indeed encouraged, Kitty to sail with him unchaperoned and in the company of what must be an all-male crew. But Emily knew her daughter well enough to realise that the decision would not have been this mysterious Rian Farrell’s alone; Kitty would not have done anything against her will.

No, if she tried to stop this marriage, Kitty would simply leave, and Emily would possibly never see her again. Her only choice was to see to the arrangements Kitty had requested, and wait and see. And trust that her daughter knew what she was doing.

On the very last day of May, as spring slid gently into summer, Emily was in the back garden tidying the last of the peonies and staking hollyhocks when the sound of wheels turning in the gravel at the front of the house made her pause. She slowly straightened and held her breath. There was a nerve-wracking hiatus of a minute or more, and then it finally came—the voice she had been waiting for so long to hear again.

‘Mama?’

Emily turned, and there she was, framed by the honeysuckle that grew around the back door. She tugged off her gardening gloves and ran. ‘Kitty!
Kitty
, my
darling!
’

Kitty stepped out to meet her, her lovely face wet with tears.

‘Mama! Oh, Mama, it’s so wonderful to see you. I’ve missed you so
much!
’

They embraced fiercely, both crying now.

‘Sweetheart,’ Emily sobbed, ‘I thought I might never see you again! Sarah said there had been a terrible tragedy. I’ve been so worried!’ And so angry, she added silently.

‘I know, Mama,’ Kitty murmured. ‘It must have been awful for you. Let’s sit down, shall we, and I’ll tell you all about it.’

‘That sounds like a very good idea.’

Emily blew her nose daintily, then took a good, long look at her daughter. Kitty still looked more or less as she had when she’d left Dereham in November of 1838. She was still slender—though Emily noticed with an anxious twinge that her daughter’s bosom had grown a little fuller, and her hips perhaps just a hint more rounded—and still very beautiful, her black hair gleaming in the sunlight and her cheeks rosy with good health. Her skin had acquired a slightly darker tinge, no doubt from being exposed to the southern sun, and her hands were not quite as soft and manicured as they had once been, but otherwise she looked the same.

Kitty said, ‘But first, Mama, I would like you to meet Rian.’

It was only then that Emily noticed a shadowy figure standing in the dimness of the hallway beyond her daughter. The figure stepped into the light, revealing himself to be a well-built man of a little over average height with blond hair tied back in a queue, a slightly weathered face and thoughtful grey eyes. He looked honest, open and really quite ordinary.

‘Mrs Carlisle,’ he said, coming forward and taking her hand. ‘I’m extremely pleased to meet you. Kitty has told me so much about you.’

His voice was low and very pleasant, and Emily was shocked to discover that it appealed to her in a manner she hadn’t experienced since Lewis had died. She withdrew her hand.

‘Good morning, Captain Farrell,’ she replied, then stopped because what
did
one say to a man who had in all probability been having very intimate relations with one’s unmarried daughter?

Kitty sensed her hesitation. ‘We met Nellie, your house-girl. She’s getting us something to eat. How long has she been working here?’

Emily shifted her gaze to her daughter. ‘About a year. She’s my assistant as well as my housegirl. I took her on when my dressmaking business started to become too much for me to manage by myself.’

‘Well, that’s good news.’ Kitty sounded pleased.

‘Yes. And it’s news you would already know if you’d ever put a return address on your letters, Kitty.’

Kitty said brightly to Rian, ‘I think Mama and I would like a few moments alone. Would you like to wait in the parlour? I’m sure Nellie will bring you something to drink.’

A look of understanding passed between them, which Emily absorbed with a sharp pang of grief because it was the sort of intimate communication she had so often shared with Lewis.

Rian smiled at Kitty and murmured, ‘
Mo ghrá
, of course,’ then turned and went back inside.

After a moment, Emily said, ‘He’s not what I expected. And he’s Irish.’

Kitty sat down on the wooden bench set against the whitewashed wall of the house, untied the ribbons of her bonnet and took it off.

‘Sit down, Mama. We have a lot to talk about.’

‘ We most certainly do,’ Emily said. ‘I’ve been so very worried, Kitty. What on earth did you think you were doing? What do you think you
are
doing?’

‘It’s a long story,’ Kitty replied.

Emily sat. ‘Oh, I knew it would be that, my dear. I’m delighted to see you, I really am, but you have a lot of explaining to do.’

‘I know, Mama, and I’m not sure where to start.’

‘Try at the beginning.’

So Kitty did. She told her mother about her first year at
the mission station at Paihia with her Uncle George and Aunt Sarah, and her growing friendship with a man called Haunui and his niece Wai, one of Sarah’s Maori housegirls—things that Emily already knew from Kitty’s earlier letters. And then she hesitated.

‘The next bit isn’t very nice, Mama. You’ll be shocked and I think quite upset.’

‘Nothing could shock and upset me more than hearing that you’d run off from Paihia and having no idea why, Kitty, so just tell me, please.’

Puzzled, Kitty asked, ‘Did Aunt Sarah not tell you anything at all?’

‘No, she has been as close-mouthed as you have, much to my intense annoyance and confusion.’

Kitty frowned slightly, then made a resigned face. ‘Well, I’m very sorry, Mama, and there’s no easy way for me to say this, but what happened was that Uncle George…well, Uncle George formed an attachment with Wai, and she became pregnant. When Aunt Sarah found out, she threw both of us out of the house, me and Wai.’

Emily looked as though she had swallowed the bumblebee that had been buzzing lazily around them a minute ago.

‘Mama?’ Kitty prompted.

‘George made a girl
pregnant?
’

‘Yes. Wai, my friend.’

‘How…how old was she?’

‘Fifteen.’

Emily stared at Kitty, horrified.

‘Unfortunately,’ Kitty went on, ‘Wai’s father was the chief of the area…well, we
thought
he was her father, and it was vital that he didn’t find out what Uncle George had done because it was the eve of the signing of the treaty—’

‘What treaty?’

‘The one in which the Maoris ceded sovereignty over New Zealand to the Crown. Was it not in the newspapers here?’

Emily thought for a moment. ‘Yes, I do remember something. But what did that have to do with George?’ Suddenly, she covered her face with her hands. ‘I simply can
not
believe that about him, Kitty. He can’t have been in his right mind. Are you sure that it was George, that this girl didn’t just make it up?’

‘Yes, Mama,’ Kitty replied in a very frosty voice. ‘It was Uncle George. Wai never told lies, and I’ll thank you never to suggest again that she did. You have absolutely no idea.’

Startled and somewhat chastened by Kitty’s tone, Emily realised that her daughter had changed far more than she had first assumed.

Kitty went on. ‘We were terrified that if Wai’s father found out that his daughter had been made pregnant by a Pakeha, particularly a man of the cloth, he wouldn’t sign the treaty. But he did find out, and because of that we had to leave immediately.’ She decided not to add that she and Wai had literally had to run for their lives. ‘Rian took us on his schooner, and thank God he did, or I might not be here today to tell you this. And no, Mama, Uncle George wasn’t in his right mind. He’d lost it steadily over the year we were at Paihia, and at the end he was almost a raving lunatic, and I’m sure he was beating Aunt Sarah.’

‘Oh, poor Sarah,’ Emily said.

‘Poor Sarah, my backside,’ Kitty retorted.

‘Kitty!’

‘Mama, she didn’t even stop to ask whether Wai had wanted to…to lie with Uncle George! No, straight away she called her a trollop and then she threw us bodily out of the house.’

Stunned, Emily stammered, ‘She never said anything about that in her letters.’

‘Well, would you?’

‘No, I suppose not. But why did she throw you out as well?’

‘I don’t know,’ Kitty said. ‘Because I was Wai’s friend, I expect. Perhaps she thought I’d known about what was going on.’

‘And had you?’

‘No, I had no idea,’ Kitty said, feeling a shadow of the old guilt pass over her.

‘So when did George go missing?’

Kitty shrugged. ‘I’m not sure, but it must have been after Wai and I had gone because I’d seen him earlier that day. You’ve not had any news at all about him?’

‘No, Sarah has only ever written that he’d disappeared.’ And then Emily recalled Sarah’s cryptic comments, which made a little more sense now, and said, ‘Oh dear, poor George.’

‘Mad George,’ Kitty corrected.

‘I can’t say I’m particularly surprised,’ Emily confessed suddenly. ‘About George losing his mind, I mean. He was always a bit…unstable. Your father often said it was likely. It was one of the reasons there was never much love lost between George and myself. I
am
horrified by what he did, though. I would never have thought he had that sort of behaviour in him.’

‘Well, he did. And it ruined Wai’s life.’

‘What happened to the child?’ Emily asked with a startled glance at Kitty. ‘I suppose it would be my niece or nephew, wouldn’t it? And your cousin!’

‘“It” is a little boy named Huatahi, and he’ll be almost a year old now. Wai gave birth to him in Sydney, but quite soon afterwards he was taken back to Paihia.’

‘By his mother?’

‘No,’ Kitty said. ‘By Wai’s real father, Haunui. It turned out that Tupehu wasn’t her father at all, although her mother had been Tupehu’s wife. That’s another long story.’ She bit her lip and was silent for several seconds. ‘Wai died giving birth.’

‘Oh, Kitty, I am sorry,’ Emily said. She touched her daughter’s
hand gently. ‘I really am. I know she meant a lot to you.’

‘She did, Mama, she really did. Which is why, one day, we’re going back to Sydney to collect her bones and take them home to New Zealand.’

Rian sat in the parlour, alternately wading his way through the plate of cake and biscuits Nellie had brought him, and twiddling his thumbs. Kitty had been outside with her mother for almost two hours. He realised they had a lot to talk about, but he wished they’d hurry up; he’d had three cups of tea and was dying to relieve himself, and, assuming that the privy was out the back somewhere, he would have to pass them on his way and he didn’t fancy his progress being monitored by Mrs Emily Carlisle, whose huge dark eyes were so much like Kitty’s and whom he suspected wasn’t overly enamoured with him. Perhaps he could nip out the front and do it in the garden somewhere. But it would be just his luck to be standing there pissing on a lavender bush when someone went past, then it would be all over Dereham village that Kitty Carlisle was marrying a man who didn’t even have the grace to use a privy when he needed one. But he was saved when Kitty and her mother appeared at the parlour door.