“And instead of carving hearts on trees,” Carol continued, “they’d carve formulas for maximizing profits.”
“Stop it, you’re both terrible!” Cat scolded.
Georgie grinned. Jane’s head for business was well known. She had made her husband’s tribe rich first by setting up trade for traditional medicines and good-luck charms, and then with sheep breeding. However, her salesmanship had also put her in constant conflict with the Maori tribe’s traditional spirituality and placidity. Additionally, her cold, self-assured manner put a strain on the relationship between her husband and his people.
But Jane’s son, Te Eriatara, whom she called Eric and everyone else called Eru, was considered a very agreeable boy. He was six months younger than Ida’s daughter Mara, and it had been practical to educate the children together. Jane had hired Miss Foggerty, a middle-aged Englishwoman who devoted herself wholeheartedly to giving the children of the local settlers and Maori a strict, classical education. Mara and Eru hated her, a fact that brought the childhood friends closer than ever. Before anything could happen, though, the Jensches had taken their daughter with them to the North Island.
The boat now drifted past the outbuildings of Rata Station, and Cat smiled with satisfaction at the stable fences, the roomy shearing shed, and above all, the multitudes of sheep crowded together in their pens. The shearing was in full swing, and hundreds of beautiful, valuable fleeces sat stacked on the bed of a wagon. Cat, Chris, and Karl had started their farm years ago with three herds of Merino-Romney crosses and French Rambouillets. They were among the first to bring sheep to the Canterbury Plains, after the Deanses and the Redwoods, and their farm was now one of the leading businesses on the South Island. In large part, they had Cat to thank for that. Catherine Rata of Rata Station was very well known, far past Christchurch, the city at the mouth of the Avon.
Chris Fenroy didn’t mind not being as famous as his partner. He loved his work, and he loved Cat. Linda and Carol were like daughters to him. Neither did he mind that, in the last few years, Rata Station’s third associate, Karl, had been traveling more than he was on the farm. Karl’s earnings as a surveyor had contributed to the early advancement of their breeding business, and now further investment was hardly necessary at all. Rata Station was self-sustaining, and it was flourishing. Chris was a happy man.
And it showed. When Chris saw Georgie rowing the boat toward the pier, he dropped everything and ran over, smiling and waving. Strands of his unruly brown hair had escaped from the leather tie that bound it in a ponytail. His warm hazel eyes glowed with anticipation. He put his hands around Cat’s waist and lifted her effortlessly to dry land. Then he helped Linda and Carol, and laughingly defended himself from Fancy’s jubilant greeting.
“Here you all are!” he said happily. “I missed you!”
“All of us, or just the dog?” Cat teased.
Chris patted Fancy. “Well, she does most of the work,” he teased back. “But of course, I prefer the company of cats.” He took Cat’s hand in his own and kissed it. “How did it go with the Butlers?” he asked, after everyone had thanked Georgie and the boatman had been paid and sent on his way. “Are they going to sell us the ram?”
Cat nodded.
“And what about your future mother-in-law?” Chris said, turning to Carol.
She winced. “I don’t think I quite meet her standards. I don’t make enough effort with ladylike activities, and I might not be able to keep up with my ‘social obligations.’”
“Mrs. Butler would obviously prefer a proper young lady,” Linda added archly. “One with a talent for landscaping formal gardens modeled after the park at Preston Manor.”
Linda captured Deborah’s tone of voice so precisely that Chris and Cat had to laugh, though they knew they should scold her for being disrespectful.
“If that’s what the lady wants, we can surely give Carol a few cuttings to take over.” Cat toyed with a blossom from the rata bush at the end of the pier. “Then her garden would bloom like Rata Station.”
“And we can work out the aristocratic part too,” Chris joked. “I just have to adopt Carol. Or would it be better if I had an honest talk with Deborah about what happens if one marries for name alone?”
Chris’s brief marriage to Jane had been arranged on the strength of his noble lineage. It hadn’t made either of them happy.
“I’m going to marry Oliver!” Carol declared. “Not his mother or his farm or his name or anything else! Oliver loves me, and I love him. He would marry me even if I—if I—”
“‘She was a lass of the low country, and he was a lord of high degree,’” Chris sang, horribly out of tune.
Cat remained silent. She wasn’t convinced that Oliver didn’t share his mother’s prejudices a little. It was doubtlessly better that the Butlers didn’t know how Carol and Linda had been conceived—even if Oliver had unwittingly chosen the “twin” born in wedlock.
Oliver Butler actually did accompany his father’s ram to Rata Station, and Carol rode out to meet him. But she didn’t get the romantic tryst she’d hoped for. Captain Butler had sent two experienced drovers with his son, and at a time when every hand was needed on the farm! Carol suspected Deborah had intervened, and she felt sorry for Oliver. She herself would have been mortified if Chris and Cat hadn’t trusted her with such a simple task. But for his part, Oliver was quite pleased with the men’s company. If he’d been alone, he told Carol cheerfully, he would have had to return home immediately. Captain Butler had traded the young ram for three ewes from Rata Station and wanted to integrate the creatures into the herd before they were taken to the highlands for the summer.
“But the drovers are going to work here for a couple of days, so now I can stay with you and then ride down to Christchurch for the final training for the regatta. Joe will be happy. We’ll be unbeatable!”
Chris Fenroy furrowed his brow when the young man made his plans known at dinner. “Can your father do without you for so long?” he asked in surprise. “Doesn’t he need every man for the shearing?”
Oliver shrugged. “Oh, Father sees it from an athletic point of view. It’s an honor if we win the gold medal for Butler Station! And if I were in college in England now, I wouldn’t be able to help either.”
Deborah Butler would have liked to send her son to Oxford or Cambridge. As far as Chris and Cat knew, that was the only wish her husband hadn’t capitulated to. He wanted Oliver to stay in the plains and learn how to run a sheep farm from the bottom up. For that, he didn’t need any higher education. Perhaps allowing Oliver to train for the regatta was part of Butler’s compromise with his wife.
In the next two days, Oliver made himself useful at Rata Station—mostly because Carol didn’t give him the option of drinking tea or taking strolls. Instead, she asked him to accompany her when she rode the perimeter to check the fences and when she herded the sheep in and out of various pastures. In that way, Carol finally got her romantic time alone with Oliver. She held his hand as the horses walked across the wide fields, and she got dizzy when the knee-high tussock grass moved like waves in the wind. It felt as though they were riding through a spring-green ocean, from which bizarrely formed stones occasionally stuck out like islands.