Kitty by Deborah Challinor

puzzlement, then clapped their own hands three times.
    Kitty burst out laughing. Rebecca, her hand over her mouth, said quietly to Sarah, ‘When you want them to do something, it’s better if you ask them in a more, well, conversational manner. They don’t particularly care for taking orders, but they do like to help.’
    ‘Oh,’ Sarah said, blushing beneath the deep brim of her bonnet. She drew a breath for another attempt. ‘I wonder if you gentlemen would assist us to carry our belongings to our new house? We would be very grateful if you could.’
    ‘Ah,’ the Maoris breathed, nodding in satisfaction at each other. Haunui barked, ‘Tangohia enei mea!’ and they bent to pick up the pile of trunks and smaller bags piled on the verandah.
    They led the way along the beach, their bare feet leaving deep prints in the coarse sand. Rebecca pointed out the small wooden church and then the Williams’s home, a pretty, two-storeyed house built in two distinct parts from lathe and plaster, surrounded by neat and colourful flower gardens.
    Sited at the western end of the little settlement, at the furthest end of the beach, the vacant house stood in front of a group of the enormous red-cloaked trees Kitty had seen from the deck of the Swordfish yesterday morning. This house was also two-storeyed, and had a verandah running along the front and halfway along each side. The roof was hipped, yet still low-pitched, with three chimneys, and three dormer windows at the front and two at the rear. Trailing behind Sarah, Kitty saw that, like Rebecca’s house, this one also had a skillion added on to the back, containing twosmall, partially furnished bedrooms, although this addition looked almost new and the bare boards still smelled of resin. The grounds were laid out in gardens, which had no doubt been neat and tidy at some point but were somewhat overgrown now. Kitty noted foxgloves, geraniums, lupins and roses growing rampantly—all flowers she knew well from home—and some big, brightly coloured blooms on a vigorous bush she couldn’t name.
    ‘Who built the house?’ she wondered aloud.
    ‘The Maoris Frederick Tait has been training,’ Rebecca replied. ‘Clever, aren’t they? Would you like to go inside now?’
    Kitty and Sarah followed her into the cool dimness, the low verandahs blocking off a good amount of the sunlight. Kitty suspected it might be cold in winter.
    The front door opened on to a short central hall, at the end of which was a flight of narrow stairs that doubled back on itself. A woven flax mat covered the floor, sand and dirt collecting around its edges. Two doorways opened off the hall: the room on the left appeared to be the parlour, while the one on the right was a dining room, already furnished with an enormous sideboard and another flax mat. The walls in both rooms were painted a fresh white.
    ‘How fortunate,’ Sarah said, eyeing the beautifully carved and constructed sideboard, pleased because she and George hadn’t had the money to bring out their larger pieces of furniture.
    ‘That was Mrs Chambers’s favourite,’ Rebecca said. ‘Her husband had it made when they arrived, but it was too big to take home with them.’
    The kitchen was through the dining room. One wall made almost entirely of bricks contained a fireplace nearly as tall as Kitty, with a heavy iron bracket suspended over the fire to hold pots, and a bread oven set into the bricks to one side. A bellows rested against the hearth, but it seemed the Chambers family had taken their pots and pans home. Sarah’s eyes gleamed—it wasn’t quite the kitchen she’d presided over in Norfolk, but it would certainly be adequate.
    There were smaller fireplaces in the dining room and the parlour, which also contained a set of built-in shelves and two shabby armchairs.The room looked dusty and unlived-in and the windows were dull with sea spray, but Sarah declared that a liberal application of elbow grease would soon have it right. Kitty