Toward the Sea of Freedom (81 page)

“There’s a school there,” Kathleen said.

Sean rolled his eyes. “Sure. An elementary school where the miners’ children learn to read and write. Grand. But I attend high school, not to mention I’ll be at university next year. And Heather? She’s in high school already. Ma, Heather has probably already spent more years in school than the girl who teaches the kids in Queenstown.”

Surely that was an exaggeration, but Kathleen knew he was more than partly right. It wouldn’t serve Sean to go to school in Queenstown, and the change of schools would do Heather no favors either.

“I’m sure Claire will allow you to continue living with her, and Michael can easily pay your tuition.”

Sean threw his head back proudly. “Thank you, but I’ll pass. I’ll apply for a scholarship. I’m sure I’ll get one. And I’ll live with Reverend Burton. My so-called father has not cared for me for sixteen years; there’s no need to start now.”

Kathleen sighed. Things between Michael and Sean had not been going well at all. Michael tried to make his son understand the situation in Ireland and his actions back then, but Sean did not want to understand. Perhaps it was the influence of the passionate skeptic Peter Burton, or of the school—both had taught him to ask questions—or that he’d learned to tell truth from lies after years of listening to Claire recount fairy tales and legends. In any case, now it seemed good fun to him to play the inquisitor with his father.

“So you stole Trevallion’s grain,” he said, as Michael told him the story of his imprisonment, “so you could leave for America with Ma, but that doesn’t make it right, does it?”

Michael shrugged. “Trevallion was a traitor. He threw his lot in with the English. And the people were starving.”

“So you were starving?” pressed Sean.

“Well, not me personally,” mumbled Michael. “It was more, well, it was a matter of principle. Ireland belongs to us, the Irish! Its rivers, its fields, and the grain that grows in them.”

Sean frowned. “You mean, you did it for political reasons?”

Michael nodded, relieved. “In a certain sense, Sean.”

Sean rubbed his temples. “So it wasn’t about Ma after all?”

Michael breathed in deeply. He had to control himself. Sean was—well, Sean had lacked a father to teach him to love Ireland, no matter how far away it was.

“Of course it was about your mother. And you. But—”

“What did you do with Trevallion’s grain afterward?” inquired Sean, still entirely at ease and with a steady voice. “I don’t quite understand: if you stole it out of patriotism, then you couldn’t rightfully sell it. Reverend Burton, he would have distributed it in the church, or the like.”

Michael gritted his teeth.

“And if you did sell it, then, in principle, you profited from the famine.”

Kathleen decided that for the time being it was best to steer Michael and Sean around each other. Surely it was better—for several reasons—if Sean were to stay in Dunedin should she really follow Michael to Queenstown. She still cast the move to the farm into doubt whenever she was not with Michael. In truth, she liked Dunedin, particularly now that she had awoken from the slump into which she had fallen after Ian’s death.

Father Parrish had succeeded in convincing her God wanted to punish her for leaving Ian and Colin years ago, and for sending Colin to England. But if He was once angry, he seemed to be no longer. He had brought Michael back to her, and Colin was thriving. The boy wrote enthusiastic letters from England—full of spelling errors, true, but he seemed to stand out as a sharpshooter, and he was revealing himself to be a gifted navigator.

No matter what the old priest said, Kathleen now saw Ian’s death as a lucky twist of fate: her path to Michael was clear. Her marriage to Ian had undoubtedly served to send her to the same country as Michael. Obviously God loved twisting paths; Reverend Burton had always said as much.

In any case, Kathleen felt happy and free as never before, and she would have loved to celebrate that with the whole city. But Michael had little interest in any of the activities of such a city—the balls and art exhibitions, the concerts or plays to which Jimmy Dunloe took Claire. Kathleen tried once or twice to convince him to come, but he behaved awkwardly among Dunedin’s high society, and people whispered about his reputation as a “prospector” and “adventurer.”

Claire and Jimmy did not seem to like having Michael around. Their complaint wasn’t that he wasn’t as cultured as they; it was that he didn’t show any particular interest in learning—whether it was about which fork to use, how to dance the waltz, or the world’s political situation. It was true that Michael had had enough to do just surviving the previous years, and he had not been able to read newspapers, let alone books.

“But he could now; he could learn anything he wanted,” Claire said as Kathleen once again defended her lover. “He doesn’t have anything to do all day, you know, except make eyes at you. I hope he at least understands farming—otherwise you’ll end up starving after all. And when it comes to being a sheep baron, Kathleen, sheep are not enough. People put the emphasis on baron, and a baron must have command of a few formalities.”

“He’ll get it eventually,” Kathleen insisted. “He’s smart. When he works a little . . .”

“That seems precisely the catch,” grumbled Claire. “When I see how he traipses through life, I ask myself how he even made it this far.”

Kathleen and Michael drove to Queenstown alone. Heather had thought about the move and had become as vehemently opposed as Sean. Naturally, her reasons were less thoughtful. She was not thinking of seeking further education yet, although Claire encouraged the girls to do so. Heather’s main concern was Chloe, from whom she did not want to part under any circumstances. The girls had always been together—really, since birth. And from the time their mothers had taken them and Sean and fled, they had shared a room, crawled into the same bed after a nightmare, and shared every thought. Claire often joked that they would only be able to marry the girls off if they found twins to be their husbands. In any case, Heather did not want to go to Queenstown without Chloe. Not even Michael’s promise to buy her a horse of her own as soon as they moved could sway her.

Kathleen did not know how this would all work out, but there was no reason to bring the children on the trip if they wouldn’t move from Dunedin. For now, she was happy to travel with Michael to see the farm. She borrowed Sean’s horse, an act he did not take well. Though Michael had suggested renting a wagon for the journey, the offer had been rather halfhearted. Lizzie’s buggy, at least, was not available. Michael hardly mentioned her anymore. That was fine by Kathleen, but Claire kept making her angry by asking piercing questions about how Miss Portland was doing.

In Kathleen’s eyes, Claire was behaving rather oddly anyway. Kathleen felt their friendship was fraying. With regards to this, too, it was good to get out of the shop and their shared apartment for a few days. But forever, right away? Kathleen still did not want to think about it. Her new life with Michael had unleashed her creativity. Her designs for autumn were daring and colorful, voluptuous and tight. Claire and the seamstresses had been utterly captivated. The customers started placing orders the moment they saw Kathleen’s quick coal sketches, which Claire had left around the shop as if by accident. Kathleen could not really picture herself milking cows again instead of drawing, but everything would be fine. Perhaps there was a shop in Queenstown similar to Gold Mine Boutique, or she could start one. A second location; that would not be so bad. Kathleen could manage it, and she would simply mail her designs to Claire. Or they would meet a couple of times a year.

It quickly became clear to Kathleen that such a meeting would not be easy. By the second day of the trip, the road to Queenstown had grown steeper, narrower, and more difficult in every respect. Kathleen would not have braved the road by herself. Claire, who was a much better rider, would not have had such difficulty, but still, they were traveling for days, and Kathleen could not imagine Claire sleeping in a tent or wagon anymore. Her friend would insist on spending the night in inns, and for those one would have to make long detours.

Kathleen, however, liked to sleep with Michael under the stars. Spring had finally given way to a warm and dry summer. Smiling, she gave a couple of stars’ names in the Maori language, but she got the feeling Michael did not like hearing them. On the second day of their journey, they started running out of conversation material. They now knew each other’s life stories—at least as much as they were prepared to share with each other. And there were not many other topics they had in common—at least not ones that were easy to talk about.

The children were not a good topic. Of course, Michael liked to hear about Sean’s cleverness and his studies, but he held it against Kathleen that she had largely withheld the story of his parents’ homeland from him. And then there was the matter of Colin. Michael had made the harshest recriminations toward Kathleen for having sent her younger son to an English military academy, of all places.

“What else was I to do?” Kathleen had asked helplessly.

Even superficial polite speech, in which society life had long ago versed her, failed. Michael fell silent whenever Kathleen made some joke referencing art or literature. To her great amazement, he had never heard anything about Darwin or his theories. Kathleen spent two hours of the journey explaining the most important content of
On the Origin of Species
to him, but he took little interest. Only Peter Burton’s exile to the gold mines as a consequence of his “heresy” provoked a reaction.

“So, that’s why they exiled the poor reverend,” he said. “I always wondered why he spent all those years down with the ne’er-do-wells in Tuapeka when he must have seen better days.”

“I’m sure he wasn’t very happy,” Kathleen said carefully. She did not want to reveal too much about her relationship to Peter Burton. “He would have preferred a pastorate in the city.”

“Why didn’t he just keep his trap shut?” asked Michael. “He could surely have preached about something else. The Bible’s thick enough, and it didn’t hurt us to hear about Adam and Eve or Eden. Which makes me think: look over there, the place under the beech trees. Doesn’t it look like Eden? What do you think, should we eat a few apples there?”

Kathleen laughed bashfully, but no matter how happy Michael made her over the next hour, a thorn stuck in her heart. To Peter Burton, it mattered a great deal what he preached. The reverend felt beholden to the truth. He wanted his flock to learn to think. It was not Darwin’s teachings that were shocking, but their consequences, the conclusions people could draw from them. About life and death, about God and fate, all those things Michael did not think about—and never had, as Kathleen reluctantly had to acknowledge.

She remembered that even Father O’Brien had complained of Michael’s superficiality. Kathleen still remembered well how the priest had wanted to send him to school in a monastery in Dublin. The anticipated course back then would have been seminary, and Michael had clearly rejected that from the beginning. He preferred to stay in Wicklow, working Lord Wetherby’s fields.

Kathleen now wondered if he could not have found an alternative with a little thought, with some hard work and elbow grease. However, Michael had not even bothered. He loved the simple life. Kathleen thought with a smile of the melodies he had drawn from his fiddle. She absolutely had to give him one. He could play for her, and perhaps there was a tavern in Queenstown where he could play in the evenings. Kathleen lost herself briefly in this daydream, but called herself back. She was falling into the same immature thinking as Michael. As if a sheep baron would have any time and desire to fiddle after a day’s work, and as if the farmhands would want to dance to their boss’s tunes in the evening.

After three days of travel, they finally reached the MacDuffs’ farm, and if Mr. MacDuff was surprised that Michael appeared with a different woman this time, he did not show it. As long as he could afford the farm, that was what mattered.

Yet the tour of the stables and shearing sheds did not go as smoothly as it had a few weeks before with Lizzie. Kathleen proved to be an exceedingly sharp observer who did not hesitate to criticize.

“The stables are rather drafty, Mr. MacDuff,” she said as they inspected the sheep stables. “No wonder you had no luck with cattle—you did try cattle, didn’t you? Come, Mr. MacDuff, I see the cow pies still. Of course you had bigger livestock in here.”

MacDuff hemmed and hawed before he admitted that the climate had proved too rough for cattle.

“Which naturally depends on the breed,” said Kathleen. “If you had decided on Angus cattle . . . But, as I was saying, you’ll have to renovate this, Michael, even for sheep.”

“We never lost many sheep,” explained Mr. MacDuff, sounding insulted. “It was just these Merinos. They gave beautiful wool, sure, but they’re so sensitive.”

Kathleen said nothing more. However, she insisted that Mr. MacDuff take her to the mountain pastures to observe the ewes.