Toward the Sea of Freedom (24 page)

“You can care for the children; we’ll have a few sheep too. For diversion you can shear your own wool for once.” It was clear that Ian was cheered by the thought of soon being able to lock up his young wife on a solitary farm.

Yet despite all the bad omens, Kathleen was excited about the world beyond the mountains. Finally, she would see more of her new country than a bay and a few hills. So she tried to look at the future with optimism as she carried Colin and Sean and a few of her things over the trail to Christchurch. Since the people of Port Cooper were expecting an onrush of new residents bound for Christchurch, the trail had been smoothed, and traveling it no longer presented a great challenge. Nevertheless, mounts were usually led, mostly by assistants who knew the region and held the halters of the horses or mules for a small fee. This practice gave the route its new name: the Bridle Path.

At the time of their move, Ian and Kathleen owned three mules, but Ian needed them to carry the household accessories and furniture. Though one could send cumbersome items up the Avon by ship, Ian was stingy about the price. After the voyage and the purchase of their first house, there was nothing left of Michael’s money. Ian bought the farm with the income from his own business.

Kathleen told herself that a part of that money still belonged to her and Sean. She was no longer ashamed that it was made selling whiskey. Distilling alcohol had always been met with a wink. What Ian did was much worse.

In any case, Kathleen and the children had to walk—like most settlers who came to New Zealand in steerage. They had an advantage because they weren’t weakened by the long voyage and they were practiced in climbing the hills of Port Cooper. Kathleen no longer ran out of breath so quickly, but the first part of the climb up the Bridle Path was, nevertheless, a challenge. She had to pull behind her a whining Sean, who did not see why he had to climb up the pass or why they had cleaned out their house. The thought of having to live somewhere else, far from his beloved Aunt Pere, scared him as much as it did Kathleen.

Worse still, the steep path was stark. The grassland quickly gave way to barren rock. For a long time, they walked along crater rims through a desert of bare gray volcanic rock. Sean clamped onto Kathleen’s hand and Colin onto her neck. Kathleen was worried before they had even made it a third of the way, and even more so since Ian did not bother to encourage her or help. It wasn’t until they stumbled at a dangerous spot that he finally took Colin’s carrier and packed it on one of the mules.

“He can’t stay up there, Ian. If he moves, the whole thing will fall down, and he’ll fall off the mountain.” Kathleen was exhausted—probably even more so since she was pregnant—and relieved not to have to carry Colin around anymore, but that rickety seat on the mule . . .

“As clumsily as you move, he really would fall,” Ian spat back. “I won’t allow you to endanger my child.”

Kathleen had a sharp response on the tip of her tongue, but she swallowed it when Ian reluctantly buckled the carrier onto the mule’s back. A lot could be said against him, but he loved Colin. He sometimes returned from his business travels with something for the boy—wooden horses or woven balls crafted by the natives. Colin still did not know what to do with them, but Sean was delighted. Kathleen would not let herself think about how he would react when he was old enough to realize that Ian brought the gifts exclusively for his brother and not for him.

The climb over the rocks and along the extremely narrow path seemed not to want to end, but then, suddenly, a plateau leveled off before them. Ian suggested they rest and tied the mules to a tree. Kathleen ought to have unpacked the bread she had brought along, and she longed for a drink of water. But curiosity overtook her. She felt carefully, while holding Sean’s hand, for the edge of the shelf.

What she saw overwhelmed her: a world that she had left behind nearly two years ago. Before her lay her homeland. Ireland. The fields. The river.

Kathleen blinked to make sure she was not dreaming. She stared down, uncomprehending, at a green landscape of gentle hills through which the Avon wound. It was broken up by copses and rock formations, just like the ones she remembered from Ireland. What was lacking were human settlements. There were no villages and no manors—only small individual farmhouses. And something else was missing: the endless stone fences that divided the land into smaller entities. This was free, open land.

Kathleen felt her heart pound with a strange sensation of happiness. She looked at the land of which she had dreamed with Michael. Bathed in sun, but green, just as green as Ireland—a land reflected in Kathleen’s eyes.

“Good Lord, Ian, it’s so beautiful,” she said admiringly. “It’s just, just like my country.”

“Your country is nothing,” Ian informed her moodily. “This is the land of our children. By the time they’re grown, I’ll own a great deal of it, enough for a grand farm. Sheep perhaps, and horses. We’ll be rich.”

Kathleen wondered if he was also thinking of Sean when he spoke of these children. He could not disown the boy. Ian had received Michael’s money—Kathleen was now sure that he had known about the purse in her possession when he courted her. Sean carried his name in exchange. A fair trade, on paper. Sean was also her son, and Kathleen would fight for him. Their land in Port Cooper had not been important to her. But this? This should belong to Michael’s child.

Chapter 7

The journey from the female factory to Campbell Town had lasted three days, and the two overnight stops were more comfortable than Lizzie could ever have imagined. First they stayed with Mrs. Smithers’s acquaintances in Green Ponds. There Lizzie was welcomed by their maid, Lisa, who was a former prisoner and who had only good things to report about her current life. Lizzie and Lisa chatted half the night, and afterward, Lizzie could hardly believe they had exchanged harmless gossip and romantic stories like normal girls instead of tales of whoring and hunger.

Mrs. Smithers and Lizzie spent the next night in a small hotel in Jericho, which lay along an already finished stretch of the road to Launceston. She rented a room for Lizzie as if it were completely natural, and then joked that she should not run away in the night. Lizzie had no intention of that. For the first time in her life, she was sleeping alone in a room between immaculate sheets and on soft pillows scented with roses and lavender. Why would she leave this lovely dream?

The journey itself was exciting. The road between Hobart and Campbell Town was already well paved, but parts of it went through the wilderness. Lizzie peered, spellbound, into the darkness of the rainforests where, she was quite sure, mischievous animals like the Tasmanian devil were about. She was shocked when a kangaroo leaped across the road and just as startled when she saw the first chain gang.

When things had gone so well for Lizzie in the female factory, she had stopped worrying about Michael. Now, however, she realized that the English Crown treated male prisoners very differently.

The overseers of the chain gang were armed and carried whips, which they used without hesitation. The men’s mostly bare backs showed the marks of this treatment. The overseers mercilessly forced them to break rocks to make way for the road and to clear the forest for new settlements.

Lizzie covered her eyes with her hands.

“Well, no, it’s not pretty, Lizzie,” Mrs. Smithers said. She told their driver to pull the covering over their prim chaise; it had just begun to rain. “But the poor devils haven’t deserved any better. Whoever has to labor here, especially in the chain gangs, did wrong elsewhere. Most of them were already serious criminals in England. I know it hurts you to see, but remember they’re robbers and murderers!”

“But some, some are just escapees,” Lizzie risked objecting.

There was talk in the female factory of how a few men were always trying to escape imprisonment. For the girls, they were romantic heroes, unyielding rebels who could not be broken by even the harshest treatment. Their attempts always ended, however, in a chain gang or the dreaded prison in Port Arthur.

“A few, certainly,” said Mrs. Smithers dismissively. “But if you ask me, idiocy is also punishable. Where do the fellows think they’re going? Into the rainforests? Where the snakes or wild beasts will get them? The towns are too small to hide in: Jericho, Hobart, Launceston—they’re not exactly London. Moreover, they don’t know anyone here. Escape is simply hopeless.”

“What if they stole a ship?” asked Lizzie. “To sail home?”

“Home?” Mrs. Smithers laughed. “Child, you know what that journey is like! Across the Tasman Sea, the Indian Ocean? Around the Cape of Good Hope? The Atlantic? If one of them had the makings of a ship’s captain, he would not be here. Although I have heard that some occasionally escape to New Zealand, that’s just hearsay. Whether they are stuck on this island or that one, in the end, it doesn’t matter.”

It does to someone who wants to be free,
thought Lizzie, trying to forget the longing in Michael’s eyes. His gaze had made her melt and dream of freedom. Yet he had only been thinking of that girl he called Mary Kathleen.

Though Mrs. Smithers had said the house in Campbell Town was grand, in truth it was nearly a castle. Lizzie marveled at the many rooms, and her eyes wandered, disbelieving, from the heavy furniture to the silver to the porcelain from England.

In Lizzie’s eyes, the greatest of these wonders was the chamber she had been assigned in the servants’ quarters. It was small—besides a bed, a table, a chair, and herself, not much would fit inside. But it didn’t matter because all of it was hers. No one else would bother her with their snoring, crying, or talking in their sleep. The bed was simple but clean—and if Lizzie dried some flowers, she could make her pillow smell just like the one in the hotel in Jericho. That could not be too hard. There were roses in the garden.

Even Lizzie’s fear that the other servants might look down on her because she was a prisoner immediately proved unfounded. The cook, Martha, immediately revealed that she was a pardoned deportee.

“Stood lookout on a burglary for my man,” she confessed. “Lord, was I a fool back then, but I really thought he’d make a load of money. Instead, he shot someone. Still, I was lucky I didn’t end up on the gallows.”

Every night, the gardener went back to the prison where he was serving his sentence. He was thankful he had escaped having to build the road, but he was such a puny little man that Lizzie couldn’t imagine he’d have managed the work. He fell madly in love with Lizzie right away, and it was not long before she was drowning in rose petals. Pete, the male servant, was big and strong enough for road work, but he was also older. He hoped to be pardoned soon, and planned to marry Martha then. The two of them would remain at the house, in apartments prepared for them. It seemed clear to Lizzie that for many convicts, deportation was more of a blessing than a curse.

She happily received her maid’s dress and bonnet, and Mrs. Smithers took the time to explain each of Lizzie’s household tasks. Polishing, dusting, waxing, serving tea and meals—none of these tasks was particularly fun, but all of it was far better than wandering the streets and serving one man after another between filthy sheets. For the first time, Lizzie was living up to the standards of the reverend in the orphanage: she was being good, living righteously, and keeping it so.

If it were not for Mr. Smithers.

Amanda Smithers’s husband was often away for days at a time, managing the road construction. Some of the prisoners were skillful, but few of them had experience in this work. As a rule, the prisoners from Ireland and Scotland were farmers. They knew about agriculture and husbandry and did excellent work on simple tasks like clearing forest for the new roads. But they had no expertise breaking rocks and securing roads.

The crew overseers almost all came from military careers rather than a background in engineering. So it was up to Martin Smithers to instruct his colleagues and decide every detail himself. He slept in a tent or barracks hardly more comfortable than the prisoners’, and it was only on the weekends that he returned to the grand house that his wife and the household servants made comfortable for him.

Lizzie first met Mr. Smithers just a week after she arrived. Though he showed no outward interest in the formal introduction his wife made, Lizzie immediately saw the glimmer in his eye, and it didn’t bode well.

He confirmed her first impression when he came into the breakfast room the next day. “Ah, so here we have the charming new house kitten,” he said.

Lizzie, who did not know how to take that expression, vacillated between her desire to ignore him and continue her work of setting the table and the curtsy propriety demanded. To avoid any issue, she did the latter with her eyes chastely lowered. But Mr. Smithers did not leave her alone.

“Why don’t you look me in the eyes, kitten?” he asked. With a salacious smile, he put his finger under her chin and lifted her head with gentle force. “Are you afraid I might see some desire? Are you really as good a little thing as my wife tells me?”