“I received a letter from my sister Agnete, who lives in Woodville,” Pieter told Mette, holding a folded page of paper towards Mette.
“What does it say?” asked Mette.
“See for yourself,” said Pieter, avoiding looking at her.
She wiped her hands on her apron and took the letter.
“Do you want me to read it aloud?”
He shrugged. “Please yourself. I know what it says.”
Mette covered her mouth with her hand so that Pieter could not see her smile.
“I’ll read it aloud,” she said. “Then we can discuss it together as I read. I’m sure she must have something very important to tell you.” She cleared her throat.
“My Dear Brother,” she began. “I know you cannot…” she stopped and glanced at him.
“Cannot what?” he asked impatiently, blind to what was coming.
“I can’t make out what the first part says,” she said. “I’ll jump to the next paragraph.”
Pieter rolled his eyes. “I thought you could read,” he said. “Go on, tell me what she says.”
She started again, carefully avoiding the words “you cannot read” and “you will find someone to read this to you.”
“My dear brother. I hope you are well. I am well and my two little ones are also well – Dotte and little Pieter. Yesterday, my dear husband Mads was in the bush and a tree fell upon his head. He was unable to jump out of the way. The doctor came and told me that Mads was dead, and…”
“Mads is dead? My sister’s husband is dead?” interrupted Pieter, abandoning all pretense that he had read the letter. He snatched the page from her hands and stared at it, then thrust it back at her. “Please, tell me what it says. I cannot read her writing. She was never good at hand writing, I…”
Mette saw that tears had formed in his eyes, and she took the letter from him gently. “I’ll read it,” she said. “You’re too upset.”
Pieter nodded, biting his lip.
“…that Mads was dead,” she repeated. “And now I must leave my house by the end of the month as it is owned by the logging company. Dearest brother, I need your help.”
Mette and Pieter stared at each other wordlessly.
“What can you do?” asked Mette. “How can you help her?”
Pieter stared at his feet for a minute, then back at Mette, worried.
“I have some money,” he said. “I could send it to her.”
“But what will she do when the money runs out,” asked Mette. “Will you send some more? What about Maren and Hamlet, and the little one coming soon?”
Pieter clasped his hands together under his chin, fingers locked, as if he was praying, but did not reply.
“She could come here,” said Mette. “She could stay with you.”
“How? Where would she sleep? How would we provide enough food for her and her children with the money I make at the sawmill?”
“She could stay in my room with her children,” Mette said hesitantly. “I’ll move somewhere else. It’s time I did. I’ll find a job and move to wherever that job is. Maybe I could be a housemaid…” How horrible that would be.
Pieter’s eyes brightened. He reached forward and held her hands tightly.
“Thank-you Mette, thank-you. I can see this is the only thing we can do. It will be difficult when the baby arrives but we’ll manage. And gradually I will make this house larger for the two families.”
She was doomed. She would become someone’s maid and lose her freedom. It would be worse than getting married to someone who didn’t love her, or who did not read and talk about what they had read. But she said, “Would you like me to write her a letter telling her about this idea?”
Pieter started to nod, then stopped. He had a better idea. “You could go to her … take the Royal Mail coach. It goes to Woodville tomorrow…you could stay with her until she’s ready and then bring her back with you when the coach returns. I’d go myself,” he added, looking sad, “if I could leave the sawmill. But I would lose my job and then everything would be lost.”
Sergeant Frank, thought Mette. I will ride the Royal Mail Coach with Sergeant Frank. “I suppose I could…”
“I’ll give you some money,” said Pieter, proud of his own generosity. “If Agnete doesn’t have a place, you could stay at a hotel in Woodville and wait for the return coach. Then when you come back with her you can stay in a hotel until you find work. Perhaps you could go to Foxton. I know there’ll be work there. Many families there are looking for servants…or you could work in a shop…sell fish even. I’m sorry your mother didn’t teach you to sew. That would have been excellent work for you. However, if you’re lucky you’ll find a nice man to marry you in Foxton.”
Mette was ready to leave as the sun rose the next morning. Pieter was to take her into town before he went to the sawmill, and she would wait there until the mail coach was ready to leave – an hour or so. Although she might not have a home to return to she was excited at the thought of the adventure that awaited her through the Manawatu Gorge to Woodville. She’d visited Woodville once before, on the way up from Wellington when they first arrived in New Zealand and she remembered it as a larger town than Palmerston, with a main street with shops and several hotels. A real town, in other words, like Haderslev where she and Maren had grown up.
She purchased her ticket and left her bag on the verandah of the Royal Hotel. Frank was out the back in the paddock getting the horses ready and did not see her, even though she stood around on the verandah for as long as she could without looking foolish. After thirty minutes of trying not to look foolish she decided to walk around the Square and look at the shops: a butcher, a greengrocer, a saddler, a photography studio, then, much to her surprise and pleasure, a bookshop. Robinson’s Fine Paper, Books, and Tobacco, it said on the sign above the door. She went in, overwhelmed at the sight of so many books in one place. Her hand clutched the purse that Pieter had given her, with the precious coins inside; ten shillings of English money, five Danish Crowns, and some more in tradesmen’s tokens, which she would be able to use at the hotel in Woodville. Never in her life had she held so much money. Unfortunately, she would not be able to use any of it to purchase another book for herself. Pieter would demand an accounting of every penny spent, and with good reason.
She stood in the bookstore and touched the books carefully — beautiful books with leather bindings and gold-edged pages. She ran her hand along the spines in wonder. So many books! She was afraid to pull one from the shelf, in case the owner of the store expected her to buy it. However, one lone book sat on a table, a piece of paper marking a spot in the middle as if someone had been reading it. She picked it up. It was a volume of poetry by a man named Robert Browning, unknown to her. Opening it, she read a verse:
I smile o’er the wrinkled blue
Lo! the sea is fair,
Smooth as the flow of a maiden’s hair;
And the welkin’s light shines through
Into mid-sea caverns of beryl hue,
And the little waves laugh and the mermaids sing,
And the sea is a beautiful, sinuous thing!
So beautiful! It made her think of her and Maren’s sea voyage from Copenhagen to Wellington, although they had not seen any mermaids. Did they exist, she wondered, or had Hans Christian Anderson simply made them up? She hadn’t seen much of the sea on their way to New Zealand. They were confined to the hold of the ship with all the other Danes emigrating to New Zealand in a fetid crush of bodies that made it hard to breathe. Maren and Pieter tried to spend time up on the foredeck, their only chance to be alone together for a few minutes, but Mette never went there. Everyone agreed that the foredeck was a place for young couples to spend a few minutes of privacy.
Many people had died on the voyage, including several young children, some barely born. Typhus had swept through their ranks and it had been very unpleasant. But still, the idea of travelling across the sea swept her away, especially as even now she herself was going somewhere. Woodville by mail coach was not as exciting the mid-sea caverns of beryl hue, but it was an adventure all the same.
“May I assist you, madam?” said a voice behind her.
Mette closed the book and placed it gently on the table, and then turned to look at the speaker. An elderly man with round eyeglasses and a shock of bright white hair was looking at her questioningly.
“I, I’m sorry,” said Mette. “I was looking at the books. I have no money, and I can’t buy one. But the poetry in this book is very fine. And I am especially fond of Mr. Charles Dickens.”
He smiled.
“As indeed one should be,” he said. “And what have you read by Mr. Dickens?”
“Only one book, but I’ve read it twice, almost. A Tale of Two Cities. It’s a most wonderful book.”
“One of my favourites,” he said, smiling. “You enjoy reading, I take it?”
“I love to read, but I don’t have much opportunity, especially in English.”
He reached towards the shelf of Dickens’ books and pulled one out. It was smaller than the others and not nearly so fine looking, with a green cloth cover with the name in gold lettering but no gold on the edges of the pages. She took it hesitatingly, opened it and started to read, then looked up at him in wonder.
“A Christmas Carol,” she said. “I would like so much to read it.”
“Then please do,” he said. “Please take it.”
“But I have no money, even for such a book that is less fine than the others, and smaller as well.”
“I would not ask a penny from you,” he said. “There are so few people who love to read in a town like this, and books deserve to be read. That one does not look as fine as the others because it’s a Colonial Edition.”
“What’s a Colonial Edition?” asked Mette, interested.
“Publishers print special editions to be sold only in the Colonies, especially Australia, New Zealand and India. Sometimes they’re even printed before the first edition in Britain. The New Zealand people, for the most part, are great readers, especially those who have come from Home and don’t expect to return.”
Mette did not like to ask him what he meant by Home. Did not everyone in New Zealand come from a home somewhere? This man sounded as if he was referring to England. She said, “These books — the colonial editions — are less expensive than the ones with the lovely gold edges?”
“Much less expensive,” he said, smiling again.
“In that case I’ll take it,” said Mette. “But when I finish reading it I’ll bring it back.”
She held the book tightly and explored the shop further. Against one wall was a stand of paper. Beside it stood a glass case filled with pens. They didn’t look like the pens Mette had grown up using, and she looked enquiringly at Mr. Robinson, who was watching her with an amused expression on his face.
“Those are fountain pens,” he said. “I expect you’ve used a dip pen—a pen that you dip into an inkwell before you write. Would you like to see one of these?”
“I would like that very much.”
He unlocked the case and took out a pen, handing it to Mette. She rolled it over in her hand and asked, “Where does the ink come from?”
He opened a bottle of ink, the kind she knew well, plunged the pen into it, and slowly pulled a small lever on the side. When he finished, he wiped the pen on a handkerchief, took a piece of paper from the shelf, and slowly wrote his name.
“Now you try.”
Mette put down her book and took the pen. She wrote her name slowly and carefully. He handed her a piece of blotting paper and she pressed it against the words so they wouldn’t smudge.
“That is a wonderful pen,” she said. “No need to keep stopping and dipping the nib in the ink. I could write so much faster if I had one of these.”
“Now that I cannot give you,” he said, his smile fading slightly.
“Oh no,” she said, shocked. “Of course, I didn’t expect you to. But I’m making recipes from the things I find in the bush, and would like to write them down.”
He looked at her thoughtfully. “Are you staying in town? I don’t think I’ve seen you in here before.”
Mette explained her situation, wondering why he had changed the subject so suddenly. He was trying to get rid of her, she was sure of that.
He took the pen from her, and said, “When you return to town, after your trip to Woodville, please come and see me.”
She nodded, wondering why an old man like that would possibly want to see her. At least he’d given her a book, so that made it a wonderful day for her, and she hadn’t even gone through the Gorge with Sergeant Frank yet. She was a little worried about the dangerous Hauhauwho had tried to take her piglet and done the angry dance – the haka. But she knew the soldiers had made sure he was gone. Fortunately, Pieter was not given to listening to gossip, or he would never have let her go to Woodville.
As she left the store she saw a case filled with cigars and tins of tobacco. Perhaps Sergeant Frank came here as well, and she’d meet him accidentally, possibly when she returned the book.