In the Land of the Long White Cloud

hoped not to be in that big house at the time because she was always a little afraid when Gerald Warden flew into one of his rages. Gwyneira liked her and Fleur did too. She did not understand what Paul had against his sister. But the master of the house…Marama decided to go straight to the village to help with the cooking there instead of lending her mother a hand at Kiward Station. Perhaps she could mollify Tonga. He had looked at her with such anger earlier, when she had mounted Paul’s horse. And Marama hated it when someone did not like her.

    Gwyneira waited for her son in the parlor, which she had taken to using as an office of sorts. After all, no guests dropped off calling cards, waiting for the family to notice them at tea. So she had found other uses for the room. She no longer feared her father-in-law’s reactions. Gerald had given her free rein over almost all house-related decisions and only rarely raised objections to her meddling with the farm business. Gerald and Gwyneira were both born farmers and livestock breeders, and the two of them worked well together in that respect. After Gerald added cattle to his operation some years earlier, they had divided the farm responsibilities rather easily: Gerald saw to the longhorns, while Gwyneira oversaw the sheep and horse breeding. The latter was the bigger job, but Gerald was often too drunk to make complex decisions quickly—though that was never mentioned. Instead, the workers simply turned to Gwyneira when it did not seem advisable to speak to the proprietor, and from her, they received clear directions. Gwyneira had made her peace with her existence and moreover with Gerald. Particularly after she had learned his history with Howard O’Keefe, she could no longer bring herself to hate him as profoundly as she had in the first year few years after Paul’s birth. She realized that he had never loved Barbara Butler. Her standards, her vision of living in a manor house and raising their son to be a gentleman, may very well have fascinated him—but in the end it disheartened him. Gerald lacked the temperament of the landed gentry; he was a gambler, a warhorse, an adventurer—and acapable farmer and businessman through and through. He never was the considerate “gentleman” with whom Barbara entered a marriage of convenience after being forced to renounce her true love—and never wanted to be either. His first encounter with Gwyneira must have opened his eyes to the kind of woman he really longed for—and doubtless it angered him that Lucas had not had the first idea what to do with her. Gwyneira had since become convinced that Gerald must have felt something like love for her when he brought her to Kiward Station. She suspected that he had not merely been venting his anger at Lucas’s impotence on that terrible December night but also expressing the pent-up frustration that he had felt for years at being nothing more than a “father” to the woman he wanted.
    Gwyneira also knew that Gerald regretted his behavior back then, even if no words of apology ever emerged from his mouth. His increasingly excessive drinking, his reserve and indulgence toward her—and Paul—spoke for themselves.
    She raised her head from her papers about sheep breeding and watched her son storm into the room.
    “Well, hello, Paul! Why are you in such a hurry?” she asked with a smile. She still found it difficult to feel genuinely happy when Paul came home. Her peace accord with Gerald was one thing, her relationship with Paul quite another. She simply could never bring herself to love the boy. Not like she loved Fleur, so naturally and unconditionally. If she wanted to feel something for Paul, she always had to engage her reason: he was handsome, with his tousled auburn hair. Gwyneira had bestowed only its color, not its consistency, and instead of curly locks, his hair had the fullness that Gerald’s hair still showed. His face was reminiscent of Lucas’s, though he had more determined, less soft features, and his brown eyes were clear and often hard, unlike the soft and dreamy eyes of his half brother. He was smart, but his talents lay more in the mathematical realm than in the artistic. He would surely become a good businessman, and he was quite competent. Gerald could not have asked for a better heir to the farm. Though Gwyneira felt that he sometimes lacked empathy for the animals and, more importantly, for the people on Kiward Station,she tried to shake