Sentence of Marriage Read online

  Promises to Keep

  Book One

  Sentence of Marriage

  Shayne Parkinson

  Copyright © S. L. Parkinson 2006

  Smashwords Edition

  Other titles by Shayne Parkinson at Smashwords:

  http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/shaynep

  Family trees and some extra background to the book’s setting may be found at:

  http://sites.google.com/site/shayneparkinson/

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  1

  July 1881

  Beyond the farmhouse the ground fell gradually in a series of low hills and flat paddocks, bright green where they had been planted in grass and darker green where the bush remained. The Waituhi creek wound along the valley floor before disappearing from sight behind a steep bluff. Amy reached the top of a hill and paused, caught as she always was by the beauty of the view.

  And beyond the mouth of the valley was the sea. The wide sweep of the Bay of Plenty stretched to the edge of Amy’s sight, and straight in front of her ocean met sky all along the horizon, broken only by White Island with its constant puff of smoke. Today she could see the island quite clearly through the crisp winter air. The ocean looked blue and mild. Some days it was grey and threatening; but always to Amy it was fascinating. To her it meant the world outside her valley; it meant excitement and adventure, and the lure of the unknown.

  As she always did, she strained her eyes to catch a glimpse of the little steamer that served the coastal settlements, but today there was no sign of it. Her father would be catching it soon, travelling to Auckland to look at the latest in farm machinery. In the whole twelve years of her life, Amy had never been ten miles away from home.

  She adjusted her grip on the handle of the basket she carried, and turned away from the view.

  The wintry sun shone out of a clear sky, with only a few wisps of cloud near the horizon. It would have been a nice day to find a quiet spot and read a book if she had had the time. The ground was still soggy from recent rain, and Amy had to watch her step in the muddy patches, but she enjoyed the fresh air on her face, blowing away the smell of dust and furniture polish that hung about her clothes. The occasional blast from the bush, where her father and brothers were using gunpowder to split logs, did not completely spoil the peace of the day.

  Amy followed the noise as she picked her way along one of the rough tracks carved through the bush to drag out trees. As she got closer to the men, she smelt the acrid smoke of gunpowder.

  When she got very close she could hear from their language that they were finding the work heavy going. She smiled to herself, and called out: ‘Is that you, Pa?’ to give them warning of her approach.

  The cursing stopped abruptly as she walked into the little clearing. Jack, Amy’s father, managed a smile for her; her brothers, sixteen-year-old Harry and John who was nearly nineteen, were more interested in the contents of her basket.

  ‘Lunch at last—I’m starved,’ said John.

  ‘You took your time,’ Harry muttered.

  ‘Don’t talk to your sister like that,’ Jack said, flashing him a look.

  Amy ignored Harry’s remark; she could see they were all tired out. ‘How’s everything going?’ she asked brightly.

  Jack pulled a face. ‘Too slow. All this mud is bl… I mean jolly hard to work in. And I think a bit of damp’s got into the gunpowder—it smells a bit strange. And your brother,’ he glared at Harry, ‘ruined that trunk.’ He gestured over his shoulder at a splintered puriri log lying in a churned-up patch of mud. ‘I told you to drill the hole two feet from the end—not half way up the flaming thing. That’s no good for anything but firewood now.’

  Harry looked sullen. ‘I’m sure he didn’t mean to ruin it, Pa,’ said Amy. ‘And you’ve got plenty more, haven’t you?’

  ‘What we haven’t got is time,’ Jack grumbled. ‘I want to get these posts split before I leave, so the boys can get on with fencing that bottom paddock while I’m away. And we’ve only done half a dozen posts all morning.’

  ‘You’ll feel more like doing it when you’ve had lunch,’ Amy said. ‘I’ve made you some currant scones specially.’ Jack brightened at the mention of one of his favourite treats. ‘Now, where can I spread this cloth?’

  They found a pretty spot nearby on the bank of the little Waimarama stream, where sunshine dappled the water as it rushed down to the Waituhi under overhanging tawa trees with their yellow-green foliage. The birds had been driven away by the men’s noise, but a few brave bellbirds came back to provide a chorus for them. A large tree stump made a picnic table. Amy set out a meat pie cut into slices, piles of sandwiches, and small cakes and scones, with bottles of her home-made lemonade to wash it all down.

  Jack slapped Harry on the back as his son was taking a bite of pie, making him choke on his mouthful. ‘Never mind, lad, I remember ruining a few logs myself when I was your age—when I was a bit older than that, now I come to think of it. And it did make an almighty great crack when it split right up the middle like that!’ He laughed, and Harry looked more cheerful.

  When they had finished eating, John and Harry set to cutting a newly-felled puriri trunk into six-foot lengths with a cross-cut saw. The dense, dark-brown timber was the bush farmers’ preference for fence posts, but getting a saw blade through it was heavy work; work for younger backs than his, their father declared.

  Amy stayed on with them, glad of the company. Since her grandmother’s death a few months before, she had had the house to herself when the men were out on the farm. Jack lit his pipe and puffed away contentedly, and Amy snuggled into the crook of his arm. She closed her eyes and took in the familiar, comforting smell of him, made up of tobacco, the damp wool of his jacket, and a hint of the grassy scent of fresh cow manure.

  ‘Only a couple of weeks now till I’m off to Auckland,’ said Jack. ‘I should be able to have a week or so there and still get back before calving’s really started. And I’ve got somewhere to stay, too—Mr Craig at the store knows a chap up there he used to be in business with years ago. He’s written to this fellow and arranged it all. Says they’ve got a flash house in Parnell. Better than staying in some boarding house, anyway.’

  ‘I wish I could go with you,’ Amy said, the city spreading before her eyes in imagination.

  Jack patted her arm. ‘I wish you could, too. I miss my little girl when I go away. But you’ve got to keep these brothers of yours in line, eh? I’ll only be gone a week or two—and I’ll bring you back something pretty. Would you like that?’

  ‘Bring me a book!’

  Jack laughed. ‘You and your books. Haven’t you got enough yet? All right, something pretty and a book, how’s that?’

  Amy tilted her face for a kiss, and felt the tickle of his beard against her cheek.
>
  ‘You’re not going to get too big for cuddles, are you?’ Jack asked.

  ‘Not for a long time.’ Amy glanced up at the sky; the sun was now well to the west. ‘I’d better go in a minute—I’m doing a steamed pudding tonight, and I need to get it started. Oh, I need to get those rugs in off the line, too.’

  Her father let go of her and crouched over his pipe, poking at it to coax more smoke. ‘You do a fine job of it all, girl. I know it’s a lot to manage on your own.’ His mouth made a crooked smile around the pipe. ‘I hope I’m looking after you properly, now your granny’s not here to do it for me.’

  His eyes told Amy he was more troubled over the matter than his light tone suggested. ‘Of course you are, Pa. Anyway, Granny taught me all about looking after the house.’

  ‘Maybe there’re things I should be telling you—things your ma would, if she’d been spared… ah, well, no use thinking about that.’ Jack looked off into the distance for a few moments, then cleared his throat. ‘At least you’re not wearing yourself out trying to manage that teaching business any more.’

  Amy made no answer, not trusting herself to speak calmly about what had been the biggest disappointment of her young life. After nursing her grandmother through the old woman’s final illness, Amy had persuaded her father to allow her to work a few days a week at the valley’s one-roomed school. The teacher, Miss Evans, had put Amy in charge of the youngest children, and the months she had spent guiding the little ones through their first steps at sounding out words and scratching letters on their slates had been the happiest of her life.

  She and Miss Evans had spoken of Amy’s intended teaching career as a settled thing. Amy’s head had filled with dreams of working in the city; of making her way into the wider world. It had been a time of rushing between farm and school, struggling to get all her work done, and cutting corners where she could.

  And it had all come crashing down at three o’clock one morning a little over a week ago, when Jack had come out to the kitchen to find Amy fast asleep in front of a pile of ironing, two flatirons dangerously hot on the range.

  ‘I’m not going to have you working day and night trying to do two jobs,’ her father had said. ‘You’ve got to give up one, and you know which it is.’

  Amy had seen her dreams dissolve before her eyes, but Miss Evans had managed to comfort her, assuring Amy that she would do her best to persuade Jack to reconsider when Amy was a little older; perhaps next year, she had said. Amy clung to this promise, and did her best not to let her father see her disappointment. They needed her at home, and it was wrong to be selfish.

  Harry drilled a hole in one of the lengths of timber, making a show of very carefully estimating two feet from the end, and took the bottle of gunpowder to put some in the hole. ‘This look all right, Pa?’ he asked. Jack hauled himself to his feet and went to check Harry’s work.

  Amy stowed the plates and cloth in her basket. She managed to get a fair distance away before the noise of splitting logs began again.

  *

  In the winter months Amy was the first person in the house to get up. She rose next morning as soon as a hint of daylight crept into her room. By the time she had dressed, made her bed and brushed her hair, the hills she could glimpse through her window stood out against the pink sky of dawn.

  She laid her hairbrush on the dressing table, in front of her little bookshelf. To one side of the shelf stood a photograph in a silver-plated frame. The picture showed a dark-haired woman, Amy’s mother, holding a tiny baby that Amy had been assured was herself at the age of six weeks. The woman was sitting on the verandah of Amy’s house, smiling at the photographer as she held her baby daughter close. Four-year-old Harry stood beside his mother, clutching her skirt and looking dubious, while a young-looking Jack stood on her other side holding six-year-old John by the hand. Jack had an identical photograph on the dressing table in his room.

  Amy picked up the photograph and studied it. She had only dim memories of her mother, who had died when Amy was three years old, but they were memories tinged with warmth and affection. She smiled back at the lady in the photograph, replaced it and ran her finger softly along the spines of the row of books that were like old friends to her.

  She slipped a black mourning band over her sleeve and went out to the kitchen. The dough she had set by the range the previous evening had risen overnight; she kneaded it and put it into pans, and by the time the range had heated up the bread was ready to go in.

  Her father and brothers wandered into the kitchen some time later, attracted by the smell of bacon and eggs. The four of them ate a leisurely breakfast, and the men lingered over second helpings while Amy washed the dishes.

  Amy had just gone outside to feed the hens when she saw riders coming up the track. It was her Uncle Arthur, who owned the next farm up the valley, along with her cousin Lizzie and Lizzie’s younger brother Alf.

  Arthur slipped from his horse and went to have a chat with Jack, eleven-year-old Alf close at his heels, while Amy held Lizzie’s reins and the girls exchanged news.

  ‘Have you heard about the whale?’ Lizzie asked. ‘It got washed up on the beach, Alf heard about it at school yesterday. We’re going down to have a look, come with us.’

  ‘I don’t think I can, Lizzie, I’m busy this morning.’

  ‘Of course you can, it’ll only take an hour or so. Hop up behind me, you don’t weigh much and Jessie’s strong.’ Lizzie patted the roan mare’s rump.

  ‘I really can’t. I got a bit behind yesterday—I had to take lunch to the men, and I ended up staying a while with them. I didn’t even get any baking done. Maybe Pa and the boys will go down later and I can go with them.’

  ‘But I want you to come with me. I tell you what,’ Lizzie said, brightening, ‘if you come now, I’ll give you a hand with your work afterwards. So you can come, can’t you?’

  Amy laughed. Lizzie was only eighteen months older than her, but as well as being several inches taller and much more sturdily built, she was a good deal more determined. Lizzie usually got her own way in the end; it generally saved time to go along with her from the beginning. ‘All right, Lizzie, you win.’ She took off her apron and ran back to the kitchen with it before hoisting herself up behind the saddle and putting her arms around her cousin’s waist. ‘What’ll Aunt Edie say about you staying here to help me?’

  ‘Oh, Ma won’t mind.’ Handling her mother was never a problem for Lizzie.

  Arthur and Alf came back and remounted, and they set off down the track at a walk. The sun had climbed above the eastern wall of the valley, promising another bright, clear day. A light breeze ruffled Amy’s hair, and there was still a touch of dew on the grass. It was a fine day for an outing.

  The steepest of the hills on both sides of the valley were still bush-clad. Many of the tallest trees had been milled over the years, but scattered among the lower-growing manuka were lofty totara, rimu with their drooping foliage, and the darker leaves of puriri. Where the forest canopy had been removed tree ferns flourished, with an occasional nikau palm among them looking like something from the pictures of tropical islands Amy sometimes saw in her father’s newspapers.

  Nearer the house, the slopes had been burned off and sown with grass years before. Shorthorn cattle wandered among the blackened stumps that had survived the burning, with sheep in the steeper paddocks. The farm’s only flat land was in two paddocks edging the creek; here the stumps had been laboriously hauled out and the ground ploughed, so that maize and potatoes could be grown.

  They left the farm track and turned on to the road down the valley. Arthur and Alf nudged their horses into a trot, but when Lizzie kicked Jessie into a burst of speed Amy gave a yelp.

  ‘Lizzie, you can’t trot with me on Jessie’s bare back—it hurts! It doesn’t feel very steady, either.’ So they had to keep to a walk, which meant the other two quickly got ahead of them.

  ‘Why are you so keen for me to go down with you, anyway?’ Amy asked as they
slowly made their way down the road.

  ‘Well, I’ve hardly had the chance to see you these last few months, you were so busy with that teaching business. And… I just thought we might see some people down there.’

  Amy gasped as Jessie made a leap over a rut in the road, jolting her against the horse’s hard spine. ‘What people?’ she asked when she had got her breath back.

  ‘Oh, just… people,’ Lizzie said vaguely. ‘There’s that grumpy old Charlie Stewart,’ she muttered as they reached the boundary fence. Amy recognised the tall, slightly stooped figure of her father’s neighbour standing close to his gate. ‘Hello, Mr Stewart,’ Lizzie called, sitting up straighter in the saddle to wave. He glared at her; she tossed her head and pressed Jessie into a brisker walk. ‘What a horrible man. Did you see how he just stared at me? He’s not a bit polite.’

  Charlie Stewart lived alone on the farm that bordered Jack’s to the north. He seemed to Amy much the same age as her father, and therefore quite an old man, with his long, shaggy beard and sandy-red hair turning grey.

  She could remember being frightened of him when she had been younger; he had shouted at her and Lizzie when they had once sneaked over his fence looking for blackberries, and he had complained to her father about the incident. Her father had been amused rather than angry, and her grandmother had thought it so unimportant that she had merely smacked Amy rather than bothering to get out the strap, but Amy could still remember the fury in Mr Stewart’s voice, and the wild look in his eyes as he chased them back across the fence. Now she felt those eyes following her as she bumped along behind Lizzie.

  ‘Aren’t you scared of him?’ Amy asked, slumping down and trying to make herself inconspicuous. ‘He always looks so fierce. Don’t you remember that time he nearly caught us on his land? I was sure he’d give us a beating if he’d got hold of us.’