Settling the Account (81 page)

‘She poisoned him,’ Amy said fiercely.
‘That’s what killed Pa.’

‘She—I beg your pardon? I don’t particularly
like Mrs Leith, but… murder?’

Amy calmed herself with an effort. ‘I didn’t
mean it like that. She didn’t put something in his food or
anything. She just… oh, I can’t really explain it properly, Sarah.
They didn’t get on very well, and Susannah made Pa’s life a misery.
I shouldn’t be telling you all this, either.’

‘It’s most interesting,’ Sarah said. ‘And
did she—’

‘Don’t, Sarah, please,’ Amy interrupted. ‘I
shouldn’t have said what I did, and I don’t want to say anything
else. If it comes to that, I did my share of upsetting Pa.’

‘Did you?’ Sarah fixed her with a keen
stare. ‘As much as Mrs Leith did?’

Amy dropped her gaze to the ground. ‘I hope
not,’ she murmured.

‘And now I’m being nosy again. I’m good at
that, as Cousin Bill delights in telling me. And today I seem to be
particularly good at upsetting you. Amy, I don’t want to waste our
time together.’ Sarah did not seem to notice that she had forgotten
to address Amy correctly. ‘Not when it might be the last chance we
have.’

She took Amy’s hand almost timidly. ‘I’m
going away. I’m going back to Auckland.’

‘But… you’ve gone home for a trip before,’
Amy said, confused by Sarah’s intensity. ‘You’ll be back, won’t
you?’

‘I don’t know. Not for some time, anyway, if
I do come back at all. I’ve resigned from the school. I’m coming of
age soon, you see. I need to devote some time to settling my
affairs, now that I’ll be fully responsible for managing the
estate. It’s all been rather self-indulgent, coming down here.’

It seemed an odd thing to say, but Amy did
not press her to explain. ‘I hope you will come back, Sarah. I’ll
miss you.’

‘Perhaps I will.’ Sarah managed a half
smile. ‘I don’t know if I can bear to stay away. We can dream about
it, can’t we?’

A hard knot formed in the pit of Amy’s
stomach. ‘Don’t say that. I don’t dream about things.’

‘Why not? You have to have dreams, or why
would you bother going on with life? I once read somewhere that
it’s dreams that raise us above the animals.’

‘Dreams cause trouble,’ Amy said, shuddering
a little at dark memories. She had had dreams of going to wonderful
places and doing exciting work. Malcolm had had dreams of glorious
battles. ‘They make you want things you can’t have, and that makes
you do things you shouldn’t.’

‘Who’s to say you can’t have those things?’
Sarah gazed intently at Amy. ‘Perhaps it’s just a matter of wanting
them enough.’

She shook her head. ‘I have a dream of you
coming to stay in my house. And here you are fretting to get back
to them after an hour away. Some dreams are more of a challenge
than others, aren’t they?’

Amy saw Danny approaching them, leading a
horse by the reins. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said. ‘Will you come and
see me before you go away?’

‘No,’ Sarah said. ‘Not with
him
there. I can’t bear to see you with him. Oh, I wish I’d come out by
myself today! And to think of not seeing you again! Mrs Stewart,
will you write to me? It would be something.’

‘I don’t know what I’d find to tell you, I
never do anything very interesting. But I’d like that, Sarah.’

‘Tell me everything you do. Don’t go
worrying about whether it’s interesting or not, I want it all. Try
and make it as if I was still here.’

Sarah reached into a pocket in the seam of
her skirt and withdrew a small card. ‘It’s one of my visiting
cards—see, it has my address on it. You will write, won’t you?
Promise me you will?’

‘I promise. I’ll try and write every
week.’

‘Oh, I wish…’ Sarah suddenly clutched at
Amy’s shoulders, leaned down and kissed her. Amy realised with a
start that Sarah was holding back tears with difficulty.

‘Sarah, I—’ she began awkwardly. But Danny
was there and waiting, and Sarah turned towards the house, one hand
across her mouth as she walked away.

October – December 1905

David had heard the horse approaching, and
he was already on the back doorstep pulling on his boots when Amy
came up to the house.

‘Good timing, Ma. I was just thinking it was
about time to get the cows in.’

‘How did you get on with your father?’ Amy
asked breathlessly. ‘Is he all right?’

‘He’s fine,’ David assured her. ‘We got on
pretty good. It’s a bit hard talking to him sometimes—you know how
he gets, talking sense for a bit then wandering off back into the
old days. He seems pretty sensible today, except he kept asking
where you were. He’d forgotten you’d gone out. I took him out on
the verandah for a bit, while it was warm.’

‘That was a good idea. He hasn’t been
getting much fresh air lately, I’ve been worried he might take a
chill. Did you have to help him with anything?’

David knew what she meant without her having
to elaborate. ‘Yes, he asked me for a hand. That’s when I took him
out on the verandah.’

‘Didn’t you use the chamber pot?’

‘No, I thought it’d be easier to do it out
there. I just gave him a hand with… you know, getting everything
out.’

‘I never thought of doing that,’ Amy said in
surprise. ‘I don’t know if I could.’

‘You used to help me when I was a little
fellow,’ David reminded her, looking mildly embarrassed at the
admission. ‘Pa didn’t seem too worried. I sort of made a joke of
it, you know? I said we could have a contest, see who could get
furthest. I told him me and Mal used to do that.’ David frowned.
‘He went a bit quiet when I said that. I’d forgotten how he’s silly
about not wanting anyone to talk about Mal.

‘He said a funny thing after that, though,’
David went on. ‘He told me to get the lawyer to come out and see
him. Why does he want me to do that?’

Amy was taken aback. ‘I don’t know, Dave. I
suppose you’d better do it, though. Don’t go into town specially,
wait until you’re going in anyway.’ She silently resolved to speak
to the lawyer before Charlie did, to warn him of Charlie’s possible
confusion.

Amy went through to the parlour, where David
had settled Charlie. ‘How are you feeling?’ she asked. ‘Not too
tired?’

‘You’ve been gone a long while,’ he said,
frowning at her.

Well, perhaps an hour seemed a long time to
Charlie, Amy reflected. She sat on the floor by his chair and
reached under his nightshirt to massage the muscles of his calves,
inclined to cramp from lack of use. ‘I know. I won’t be going out
like that again, it was a bit special today. Has Dave been looking
after you all right?’

‘He’s not been too bad. He’s not a bad boy,
that Dave,’ Charlie allowed, and from him it was high praise. ‘You
been to Kelly’s place, have you? What’d you go there for?’

‘They had a christening today,’ Amy told him
yet again. ‘It was a special one—they had two babies done.’

‘Whose bairns?’

‘Well, Benjy’s Lizzie and Frank’s new baby.
He’s six weeks old now, he’s a lovely baby.’

‘Kelly’s bairn?’ Charlie said. ‘How many’s
that?’

‘Eight of them now. I don’t think they’ll
have any more, though, Lizzie had a bit of bother having Benjy.’
Seeing how much of a shock the news was to Charlie, she tried to
make light of it. ‘Poor old Frank, fancy having to get used to all
those broken nights again. I’m glad we don’t have to put up with
new babies all the time.’

But Charlie was not listening. ‘He’s got a
pile of sons, that Kelly. Didn’t know he’d got another one. Lucky
bugger.’

There was no comfort Amy could offer to that
sense of loss. She took refuge in trying to distract him from his
bleak thoughts. ‘Maudie got Lucy done, too. That was the other
baby.’

‘Who’s Maudie? Who’s Lucy?’ Charlie said
irritably. ‘Don’t know who you’re on about.’

‘Maudie’s Lizzie and Frank’s oldest. Do you
remember her?’

Charlie frowned in thought. ‘She was born
the time of the earthquake. When the mountain blew up.’

‘That’s right. Fancy you remembering all
that—I’d just about forgotten, myself.’

‘She’s a bairn of her own now?’

‘Yes. Lucy’s nearly six months old, I think.
Oh, she’s a lovely baby, Maudie’s proud as anything of her.’

Charlie was quiet for some time. ‘The boy
was older than her,’ he said.

Amy had hardly dared hope that Charlie would
ever allow himself to speak of Malcolm again. She held her breath
for a moment, startled, then spoke gently. ‘Yes, he was. Mal was
seven months older than Maudie. He’d have been twenty this
year.’

‘Twenty. Just about a man.’

And instead he was dead. Amy took Charlie’s
unresponsive hand in her own and held it, but she sensed that it
would upset him too much to talk about Malcolm any more just now.
She would raise the subject again soon, she promised herself. For
too long Charlie had pretended he had forgotten Malcolm.

That evening she took the photograph of
Charlie, herself and the boys from her bedroom and put it back on
the mantelpiece where it belonged.

*

Amy hoped that as the weather grew warmer
Charlie might become a little stronger. She began taking him out to
the verandah most days, sure that sun and fresh air would do him
good.

She had hoped, too, that a brighter outlook
than the four walls of his room might cheer him. But he seemed to
grow quieter rather than livelier, often sitting staring out over
the edge of the verandah for hours on end without saying a
word.

He hardly seemed to notice whether Amy was
there or not when he was in one of these moods. When she came out
with his lunch one day in December, he showed no sign that he had
heard her approach. She came up slowly, anxious not to startle him.
As she moved in front of him, she was troubled to see that his face
was wet with tears.

He had seen her now, and it was too late to
slip away quietly. She put the tray with his lunch down on the
little table beside him and sat on a stool next to him.

‘What’s wrong, Charlie?’ she asked. ‘Don’t
you feel well?’

He rubbed his hand across his eyes in a
clumsy attempt to clear away the tears. ‘Useless. That’s what I am.
Bloody useless.’

Amy took a handkerchief from her apron
pocket and wiped his eyes. ‘No, you’re not. Dave needs you to tell
him what to do on the farm. He asks you things all the time, you
know he does.’

‘Don’t know whether he’s making a decent job
of it or not. Can’t get out there to keep an eye on him. Can’t get
out on my farm.’

He looked past her to the pasture stretching
away in the distance. The sea was a silver-spattered pool of blue
at the end of the valley, but Charlie’s gaze did not go beyond the
boundaries of his land. ‘Can’t get out on my farm,’ he echoed.
‘Might as well be dead.’

‘Don’t say that,’ Amy soothed. ‘You mustn’t
fret about things.’ She stopped, aware of how inadequate a word
‘fret’ was for what Charlie was feeling. He wasn’t fretting over
his land; he was mourning the loss of it. Amy could not bear to
watch his suffering without doing her best to ease it.

She sat beside him in silence, pondering the
details of how she might manage it, before she made the suggestion.
‘How would you like to go on a picnic?’ she asked, careful to make
her voice bright. ‘We could have one tomorrow, the three of us.
I’ll make a nice lunch with all the things you like, and Dave can
show you what he got done over the winter. You can see the new
calves, too. It’ll be nice, won’t it?’

His eyes opened wide, then his face
crumpled. ‘I can’t. My leg won’t work.’

But Amy had seen his look of wonder as, just
for a moment, he had let himself believe he could go walking over
his land once again. ‘Yes, you can. You can walk a little way if I
help you. Take your stick, and you can lean on me. We don’t need to
go very far. Please, Charlie,’ she urged gently. ‘Please.’

Charlie made a rumbling noise of disgust.
‘Ah, if it’ll put a stop to your nagging I might as well. Now shut
up about it for five minutes, can’t you? I want my lunch.’

‘All right,’ Amy said, turning her face
aside to hide a smile as she leant over to pick up his tray.
Charlie’s show of grumpiness was the best sign she could have hoped
for. It told her that the idea of the picnic had roused him more
than anything else could have.

*

‘I’ve got pies and sandwiches in that one,
and cakes and scones in the other basket,’ Amy told David. ‘Did I
put the boiled eggs in? Yes, there they are. Be careful of the
scones specially, they’ve got jam on them. Let’s see, two bottles
of lemonade should be enough, and I’ve put in some beer for your
father.’ She looked around the kitchen. ‘Have I forgotten
anything?’

‘You’ve got enough to feed half a dozen of
us, it should be enough,’ David said. ‘Aw, heck, then there’s all
these rugs and things to carry!’ He rolled his eyes in pretended
horror.

‘Oh, stop complaining! You’ll hardly even
notice it, a big, strong boy like you,’ Amy said with a laugh.
‘Anyway, it’s worth it if it cheers your father up,’ she added,
suddenly serious again.

Charlie’s eyes were brighter than Amy could
remember having seen them in years as they set off. He grasped his
stick in his good hand, the other arm around Amy’s shoulders, and
took his first few cautious steps.

They had begun well enough, but not many
minutes passed before Amy had to ask herself if she had done the
right thing. Charlie was leaning on her more and more, and his
steps became more hesitant.

They reached a steeper part of the paddock.
Charlie stumbled, and would have fallen if Amy had not been taking
so much of his weight. His near fall frightened him, and he leaned
more heavily than ever on her. When he missed his footing again, he
trembled so violently that they had to stop and wait for him to
calm a little.