“I enjoy working with the dogs,” Carol began, then fell silent as her mother approached.
“Could I please have that cup of tea, Mrs. Butler?” Cat asked with a smile, gazing out over the lawns.
Almost five acres of the original grassland had been landscaped into a formal garden, and aside from the occasional southern beech that Deborah Butler tolerated for shade, none of the plants were native to New Zealand. Deborah and her gardener had hacked out all the pervasive rata bushes that had lent their name not only to Cat’s farm but to Cat herself.
Cat Rata had grown up without a family. Her mother, Suzanne, was a mentally feeble prostitute who didn’t even remember her last name or bother to give her baby a first one. The neglected child had just been referred to as “Kitten.”
But Cat had given up being upset about all that a long time ago. She had escaped the whaling-station brothel at the age of thirteen and lived for several years with a Maori tribe, where she had been called Poti, which meant “cat.” She’d been adopted by Te Ronga, the chieftain’s wife and tribe’s healer, and Cat mourned the woman whose murder had set off the Wairau incident.
“This is a very beautiful garden,” she remarked politely. “Even if it is a little strange. England looks like this, right?”
Deborah gave a small nod, eyeing Cat just as critically as Cat had eyed the garden. If she hadn’t been so properly raised, she would have chosen the same words to describe Cat: very beautiful, but a little strange. Deborah took in Cat’s brown cotton dress, simply cut and absolutely unsuitable. She wasn’t wearing a hoopskirt under it either, and Deborah suspected that she didn’t even own such a garment.
Of course a hoopskirt was impractical for farm work and for the boat trip, and Deborah could almost understand the lack of one. But Cat had also elected not to wear a corset, and that really was unacceptable! However, her appearance was another matter. Cat Rata was quite slender, and her finely formed oval face was dominated by expressive brown eyes filled with awareness and intelligence, and at the moment, a little sarcasm. Her hip-length blonde hair was bound into a thick braid at the back of her neck, which made her seem younger than her almost forty years. It was an improper hairstyle for a grown woman, Deborah thought, but she had also seen Cat wearing her hair loose, held back with a broad Maori headband.
“I modeled our garden after the park at Preston Manor,” Deborah said primly. “Of course, the original was much larger. It even had space for bridle paths—and long walks.”
She gave her son a short, meaningful glance, which caused him to spring to his feet. Oliver had been longing to take Carol for “a little walk”—it was the only chance for intimacy that Deborah’s strict rules would allow.
“May I show you the yellow roses, Miss Carol?” he inquired formally. “My mother is very proud of them; they don’t usually survive here. You are welcome to join us too, of course, Miss Linda.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not interested in roses,” Linda lied.
In fact, Linda enjoyed accompanying Cat and the local Maori tribe’s medicine woman when they searched for medicinal herbs. Having read an English book about herbal medicine in the Old World, she knew the effects of rose oil on infections, insect bites, and minor heart difficulties, and had even planted a rosebush in the kitchen garden at Rata Station. Linda experimented not only with rose oil and rose water but also with rose hip tea and mashed rose hips for menstrual difficulties and stomach pain. However, she didn’t care about the color of the blossoms or Deborah’s valuable cultures. She was happy for her sister, who would enjoy the short time alone with her fiancé.
“Just don’t be gone too long,” Cat said. “Georgie will be here in half an hour or less, and we don’t want to keep him waiting.”
They certainly wouldn’t miss the arrival of the boatman. Deborah’s garden bordered the Waimakariri River, which enabled promenades on the riverbanks and summer picnics by the water.
Oliver gallantly offered Carol his arm as they hurried away on the gravel path that led around the garden. To Cat, it seemed almost like an escape. But they wouldn’t be able to avoid Deborah’s sharp eyes. The imported English shrubbery wasn’t nearly dense enough to hide a stolen kiss.
“The two children really don’t get to see each other very often,” Deborah remarked as she poured tea for Cat.
“In bad weather, the journey from one farm to another is very difficult,” Cat replied. But she was personally of the opinion that a young man carried on the wings of love should ride through the rain and mud much more often than Oliver did. Carol would have liked to visit Oliver by herself, but Chris and Cat had forbidden it. They could well imagine what Deborah would have thought of a young girl who rode a horse two days alone through the wilderness. “But in a few days, there will be another opportunity for the young couple to see each other,” Cat added casually. “Your husband is selling us a breeding ram, and of course Oliver won’t want to miss the chance to bring the animal to Rata Station himself.”
Deborah Butler raised her eyebrows. “My son is no drover.”
Cat smiled. “It’s not that hard,” she replied. “I’m sure he’ll manage.”
Linda suppressed a giggle.
“It was his father’s idea,” Cat continued, and took a sip of tea. “He thought Oliver would be thrilled at the chance to combine business with pleasure.”
“I hope he doesn’t lose the ram on the way,” Linda joked later, as Cat shooed the two girls toward the pier.
Cat had comforted Carol with the hope of a swift reunion with Oliver. At Rata Station, she would see much more of him than she did under Deborah’s strict supervision. Neither Chris Fenroy nor Cat herself had any interest in playing chaperone. They approved entirely of the relationship between their adopted daughter and the Butlers’ only son and heir. Carol would bring a large herd of sheep into the marriage as a dowry and would be able to run her own farm. Linda and her potential husband, who still had to be found, would one day run Rata Station.
“That way, we’ll be neighbors and can do everything together!” Carol had said happily when she’d told her sister about her engagement to Oliver Butler.
The two young women couldn’t imagine ever being separated. They had been raised as twins, although they knew that they only had their biological father in common—a secret that the neighbors didn’t know. Of course there were rumors. The situation at Rata Station seemed rather strange even to the relatively open-minded settlers in the Canterbury Plains. When Linda and Carol were younger, the neighbors had been scandalized at their two sets of mothers and fathers: they’d been raised by Carol’s mother, Ida; Linda’s mother, Cat; and their respective partners, Karl Jensch and Chris Fenroy. It was particularly hard for Deborah Butler to accept the unusual family structure. She complained constantly about Ida having left Linda and Carol in Cat’s care while she traveled the North Island with Karl, and would doubtlessly be shocked if she found out the truth about Linda and Carol’s parentage. Because of reactions such as hers, Cat and Chris, like Ida and Karl, had concluded that it would be better to raise the two girls as twins from Ida’s previous marriage to Ottfried Brandmann—and to talk as little as possible about how Ida had become a widow.