Toward the Sea of Freedom (52 page)

“A fascinating theory,” the reverend replied with gleaming eyes. “It discusses the origins of plant and animal species. Darwin supposes that one species develops from another, so to speak, over the course of many thousands of years.”

“Well, and?” Claire asked and took a sip of wine. “It’s like with sheep breeding. You cross one sort with another so that the wool becomes more beautiful and the sheep themselves more resistant to weather. That’s right, isn’t it, Kathie?”

Kathleen nodded absentmindedly.

“But perhaps it could be applied to humans as well,” Reverend Burton said.

“Nothing new there, either,” Claire agreed. “I’m dark-haired with brown eyes; my husband has, had, hm, has”—by now Claire had told so many versions of her story that she no longer recalled whether she had declared herself or Kathleen the widow—“blue eyes and blond hair. And Chloe has black hair and blue eyes. What’s the problem?”

Reverend Burton bit his lip. “You need to see it on a larger scale, Mrs. Edmunds. People are suggesting that this Mr. Darwin will conclude that mankind descended from apes.”

Claire furrowed her brow. “I saw a monkey once,” she said. “It was very cute. A little like a person. It seemed very clever. It collected the money for the organ grinder.”

Reverend Burton had to laugh. “The greed highly developed species seem to have in common seems so far to have escaped Mr. Darwin.”

Claire giggled, but Kathleen hardly seemed to be listening.

“But now what does that have to do with you defending a piece of land in Dunedin against the Church of Scotland instead of preaching somewhere in the Canterbury Plains?” Claire asked. “I don’t quite see the connection.”

Reverend Burton pointed to the volume. “I preached about this,” he explained, “about how it will make a whole new interpretation of the Bible necessary.”

Claire understood. “Because then all that with Adam and Eve can’t be true. But I could not imagine that anyway; I wasn’t made from anyone’s rib.” She threw her head back proudly, and Reverend Burton could hardly contain his amusement.

“Whereby we both seem to have made ourselves guilty of blasphemy,” he teased her. “In contrast to you, Mrs. Edmunds, my bishop insists—and with him, it seems, the whole Anglican Church—that Mr. Darwin is wrong and the Bible right. So you’ll have to make your peace with the rib, even if you like the monkey better.”

“But what bothers the bishop about this new interpretation?” Claire sniffed with satisfaction at her wine glass. “Does it really matter in the end if God made the world in six days or if it took him a little longer?”

Kathleen raised her head. She had seemed uninvolved yet had been listening attentively. “If the bishop admits that the story of the rib isn’t true,” she said calmly, “then he has to accept that maybe the rest of it isn’t true either. All that about, about the Virgin Mary maybe, and the Immaculate Conception. Or with the indivisibility of marriage.”

Reverend Burton did not know why, but he had the impression that the beautiful blonde woman felt a bit comforted by this conversation.

Chapter 2

Finding a home for two women and three children in Dunedin proved as difficult as finding an inn. There were indeed some finished houses, and a few of them were lovely, several-storied stone buildings, but the owners resided in most of them, and if anything was for rent, they could pick out their renters. An Anglican and a Catholic with no husbands were at about the bottom of their wish lists.

“And things look bleak for our tailoring too,” sighed Claire. The women had shopped and cooked for their second night as guests, along with their children, at the reverend’s table. “Literally, the women here don’t seem to wear anything but black.”

“Do you have other skills to offer?” Reverend Burton asked. “Aside from cooking. You’ve done another marvelous job, Mrs. Coltrane. Though I fear hiring a cook would seem as much of a luxury to the Scots as the purchase of beautiful clothing.”

“Farm work,” said Kathleen quietly. “I always worked in the garden, in the fields, and with animals. Sean can do that too.”

The boy nodded sadly. He had been hoping he would no longer be bothered with feeding animals and spreading manure, but he understood the seriousness of the situation. Of course he would do whatever work was needed.

Reverend Burton thought for a moment, but then his face brightened. “Well, if you don’t have your hearts set on Dunedin, farm work gives me an idea. I’ve already mentioned Johnny Jones, haven’t I, our generous patron?”

The women nodded.

“As I said, he originally had a whaling station, but for a while now, he’s made his money in trading and shipping—and he runs a farm. That is, there are actually several farms in Waikouaiti, a small town not far from here. Several farmers have settled there since Dunedin was founded. They provide the city with its groceries. As far as I know, everyone there is doing well for themselves.”

“Where exactly is it?” Claire asked, but then she was already somewhere else with her thoughts. “Oh right, I remember: I could also teach piano!”

Both Kathleen and the reverend saw better chances in Waikouaiti, if only in regard to piano lessons for the Scottish children.

“Soon you’ll be thinking of playing the organ in their services,” chided Kathleen when she noticed that Claire was loath to let go of her latest business idea.

“Assuming they don’t consider music blasphemous too. On the farm, we’d surely be able to weave again. We might even be able to sell wool in sober colors here.”

“We’ll go there tomorrow,” said Reverend Burton, in good spirits. He opened another bottle of wine.

Claire seemed somewhat unhappy about having to live outside a city again, but Kathleen appeared to like Reverend Burton’s idea. She came to life as he told her about settlers in the small town. Johnny Jones had brought them over to New Zealand from the Australian city of Sydney.

“But were they really allowed to leave?” she asked. “Aren’t they all convicts?”

“First of all, not all Australians arrive in the country as convicts,” answered Reverend Burton. Her sudden and lively interest surprised him. “And second, only a few people there are condemned for life. Most serve seven to ten years. As soon as their sentences are served, they’re free. They can go wherever they’d like, though they never make enough money for passage back to England. Why Jones would bring over Australians and whether they were convicts or not, I have no idea. But you can ask the people tomorrow yourself.”

Sean yoked the mules; the women had not yet changed stables, which seemed odd to Reverend Burton. He thought Kathleen Coltrane would be happy to meet a landsman. Not to mention Donny Sullivan charged less money than McEnroe. But Kathleen and Sean acted downright skittish, if not repulsed, when talk turned to changing stables. Apparently they had something against horse traders.

Reverend Burton rode his horse beside Sean and just behind the women and their two daughters in the carriage. He noted how surely the boy sat in the saddle of his small black horse. True, most farm children knew how to ride a horse, but Sean seemed like an expert; he handled the young animal with facility and care. Still, he blushed when Reverend Burton paid him a compliment about it. A quiet boy, like his mother. Reverend Burton thought them both equally fascinating, even if Kathleen never seemed to warm up to him. Perhaps she had reservations about his religious affiliation. The Irish had certainly suffered considerably at Anglican hands. But Reverend Burton was in no hurry. He would be there a long time yet, and Kathleen, too, it seemed. She might thaw someday.

Waikouaiti lay several miles outside of Dunedin’s borders, and it couldn’t be compared to the Scottish settlement. Here, people settled on the coast, and the area was entirely flat. Otago’s hilly terrain did not begin until a mile west of the farms. Two miles farther lay the mouth of the Waikouaiti River. It immediately reminded Claire of the Avon, and in truth, Waikouaiti was more comparable to the Canterbury Plains than Dunedin. The little town consisted mostly of cabins similar to the farmhouses Kathleen and Claire had left behind.

Reverend Burton headed straight for a neat red-painted school, which stood beside an equally well-kept church. There was also a parsonage.

“My brother of the cloth, Reverend Watgin, also serves as the teacher here,” he informed Sean, who was listening attentively. “He’s been here for almost twenty years now and is very strict—so, please, not a word about Mr. Darwin’s ideas. Reverend Watgin thinks me dangerous; the bishop must have warned him about me. In any case, Johnny Jones brought him here to offer his settlers spiritual and moral support. He really thought of everything.”

Reverend Watgin and his wife did not seem any less bigoted and ossified than the Scottish settlers of Dunedin, but the couple had been on the South Island longer and seemed to have lost their pioneering spirit. They showed only a modicum of politeness to Reverend Burton, and they viewed Kathleen, Claire, and the children with skepticism.

“So, from the plains,” said Reverend Watgin, a tall, haggard man with piercing eyes. “Widows?”

“My husband is at sea,” Claire rushed to assure them.

“And why aren’t you waiting at the harbor like a good wife?” Watgin asked sternly. “Whenever you are involved in something, Reverend Burton, we see the effects of modern times. Priests deny the Bible; women leave their homes . . .”

Kathleen and Claire said nothing to his grumblings, as Reverend Burton had advised them.

“We briefly had to pay our respects there first, but Reverend Watgin does not have much say,” he told them later. “The main thing is that Mrs. Jones is like you. Johnny is at sea most of the time; his wife holds rank here, and she’s an uncrowned queen.”

Mrs. Jones resided on Matanaka Farm, named for the strips of coast on the north end of Waikouaiti Bay. She ruled over a large, tidy farmhouse surrounded by gardens of lushly blossoming flowers, which Claire noticed first. The farm buildings were painted in fresh colors that also spoke of a person who embraced her life—and what was more, the mistress of the house seemed to have a weakness for good-looking young men. Her small blue eyes shone when she opened the door for Reverend Burton.

Mrs. Jones was plump, and a smile spread across her greasy face at the first glimpse of her male visitor. Excitedly, she adjusted her coiffure, which seemed to consist of a thousand blonde corkscrew curls. Doubtless it took her hours with her curling irons every day to give it shape, but it made her look younger. Her cheerful, high-pitched voice contributed to people liking her at once.

“Reverend Burton! Are you bringing those dangerous thoughts of yours back to our tiny little town?” she teased him, all her little curls bobbing with pleasure. “Now what have you brought us here? Not any fallen women, I hope?” She shook her finger at the reverend. “Recall: ‘our descent hearkens back exclusively to decent, well-regarded citizens of South England.’” She spoke these last words with a high-pitched, almost nagging voice, apparently imitating someone. “So please don’t entrust any little sheep that have faltered in any way to our Mrs. Ashley. They could blacken the whole herd!” Mrs. Jones winked at the reverend and the women.

“And so she denies heredity too,” laughed Reverend Burton. Apparently, they were talking about a mutual acquaintance. “But Mrs. Jones, you should be ashamed. We’ve just got here, and you start mocking your brothers and sisters in Christ. Is that Christian?” He did not wait for an answer. “I think it’s time for a good work—as atonement, so to speak—and you’ll suffer in silence what Agnes Ashley has to say about it.”

At that, the reverend described the women and children’s situation to Carol Jones.

“You know the Scots, Mrs. Jones. They immediately assume eternal damnation when a woman is alone, no matter the reason. Mrs. Edmunds and Mrs. Coltrane will never have any luck in Dunedin, and I can’t let them sleep in the church forever. People are already wagging their tongues. Even our own ladies are no angels, after all, as you well know.”

Mrs. Jones giggled. “Aye. Do you have any experience with farm work?” She turned to Kathleen and Claire. “Or can you make yourselves useful some other way?”

Kathleen nodded, wanting to say something about herself, but Claire beat her to it. “We had a sort of business in Christchurch,” she declared courageously. “Ladies’ fashion in the styles of Paris and London.”

With a grand gesture, she pulled out a few of Kathleen’s drawings and held them out to Mrs. Jones. The town founder’s wife looked at them with an increasingly covetous facial expression.

“You can tailor this here?” Mrs. Jones’ tiny curls bobbed again. “Truly?”