Abbeyford Remembered

by Margaret Dickinson

  But Evan appeared in a very jovial, hearty mood, surprising not only Carrie but her mother and brothers too. Far from berating her further, he kept glancing at his daughter and grinning as if sharing some secret with her. Carrie and her mother exchanged looks and Carrie lifted her shoulders in a shrug, signifying that she, too, was mystified by her father’s unusually good mood.

  Since her father had not questioned her any more about her visits to Abbeyford, Carrie’s desire and love for Jamie, which daily grew stronger, made her risk another visit the following afternoon.

  She followed the lane up towards the Manor and as she rounded a bend she saw ahead of her the gig belonging to Lady Lynwood. Seated in the stationary gig was Lady Adelina and her daughter, Francesca, and beside the vehicle nearest the girl was Jamie Trent on horseback. He was smiling down at Francesca, who, with her head thrown back and laughter on her lips, was the picture of elegant loveliness.

  Carrie felt an almost physical pain in her breast. Jealousy swept through her in an overwhelming wave, making her feel quite dizzy. Quietly she crept through a gap in the hedge and moved silently along until she was level with the gig, though hidden by the hedge. Now she could hear their conversation.

  “We have not seen you of late, Jamie,” Francesca was saying in a purring tone. “You have neglected us shamefully, has he not, Mama?”

  Peering through the leafy hedge, Carrie saw Lady Lynwood smile gently. “I guess you’ve been real busy on the farm, Jamie?”

  Jamie nodded and there was a trace of grimness in his tone. “I’m afraid so. We’re losing workers to the towns, to say nothing of the land we’ve lost.”

  “Oh, Jamie, I’m so sorry. Is there anything we can do to help?”

  Jamie shrugged and sighed. “No. I don’t reach the age of twenty-five – when I can take over completely – for another two years. If only no more goes before then, we may pull through.”

  Carrie closed her eyes and almost groaned aloud. Lloyd Foster and her father planned to take more land from Jamie, she knew. But these thoughts were driven from her mind again as she saw him lean down towards the gig and take Francesca’s hand in his.

  “I must go, my dear. I’ll try to visit soon –I promise.” He raised her gloved hand to his lips.

  “Now don’t go breaking that promise, Mr Trent, or I shall be mightily put out!” The girl teased, laughing up at him flirtatiously.

  Carrie knew nothing of the ways of Society, of coquetry or gentle, meaningless, flirting, so her heart twisted with pain and jealousy. There was something between that girl and her Jamie! Jamie rode off in one direction and Lady Adelina slapped the reins, and the gig moved off in the other. Carrie saw Francesca turn round to wave again to Jamie and saw his return wave and she closed her eyes to shut out the picture.

  She sat down where she was, behind the hedge at the edge of a meadow and tore angrily at the long grass with her fingers. How dare he? How can he make love to me one moment and then be so affectionate towards that girl? Hate began to grow in Carrie’s heart for the girl she hardly knew. A few moments later she sprang to her feet and ran and ran until her lungs were bursting, up the lane, through the wood to the abbey ruins. Only then did she sink down against the crumbling walls, panting and sobbing.

  Impatient with herself for shedding tears, Carrie rubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand. Gradually her misery turned to anger against Jamie. She waited and waited. An hour went by and still he did not come. When at last she saw his horse appear out of the trees and canter towards her, even the sight of him, which caused her heart to beat a little faster in spite of her anger, could not wipe away the picture of him with Francesca.

  “Where’ve you been? You’re late,” she greeted him crossly. “I’ve been waiting an hour or more.”

  “I’m sorry, my darling.” He came to her and tried to take her in his arms but she pushed him away.

  “I’m not your slave, your plaything to be picked up and put down just when you feel like it!”

  “Carrie, Carrie …”

  “I saw you with – with – her!”

  Jamie frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  “With Francesca. Mighty friendly you seemed to be!” Carrie stood, her hands on her hips, her feet planted wide apart, her violet eyes flashing now, her wild hair flying, quite unconscious of how lovely she looked – a natural, untamed beauty.

  Jamie gazed at her admiringly. “My dear,” he said softly. “Lady Lynwood was once my stepmother, and Francesca and I are like brother and sister.”

  “Huh! It didn’t look like that to me!” Carrie retorted. “ Fluttering her long eyelashes at you, making up to you. You forgot all about meeting me here, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

  “Carrie, my dear love. I’ve come at the same time as always. It’s only three o’clock. You must have been early.”

  Then she remembered. She had been so distressed by the scene in the lane that she had completely forgotten to pay her usual visit to her grandmother’s cottage before coming to the abbey ruins to meet Jamie.

  Suddenly her anger evaporated and she flung herself against him, throwing her arms about him. “ Oh Jamie, I’m sorry. Forgive me.”

  “My darling girl. There, there,” he said, stroking her hair and, gently tilting her head back, he kissed her ardently.

  Carrie felt him lift her into his arms and carry her the short distance towards the one small cell-like room left whole in the abbey ruins. They squeezed through the small opening. Inside it was dim and quiet.

  They kissed with growing passion, lost in their own secret world, their embrace all the sweeter after the misunderstanding between them. His fingers gently unfastened the buttons of her coarse blouse and caressed her. Swept away on a tide of love they gave themselves to one another in mutual desire. Jamie’s lovemaking was so gentle and thoughtful that – virgin though she was – Carrie felt no pain, only an overwhelming need to give herself to this wonderfully considerate man.

  Afterwards they lay in each other’s arms, the tempest of their ardour subsiding to a calm feeling of closeness.

  “I know so little about you,” Jamie murmured, his lips warm against her neck, “and yet I know that I love you, my dearest Carrie.”

  She ran her fingers through his brown hair. “ You’re the first man I’ve loved,” she told him, almost shyly.

  “I know,” he whispered, “ and I’m glad – so glad.”

  “My first love and my last love.”

  “Oh, Carrie, Carrie,” and his mouth found hers again. “We must be together always. Marry me, my darling. Be my wife.”

  “Yes – oh, yes,” she breathed and closed her eyes. There could be no greater happiness on earth, she thought, than this moment.

  The weeks of that hot, ardent summer faded into autumn. Lloyd Foster made ready to begin work on the cutting needed about a mile north of Abbeyford and the embankment through the valley itself.

  “We take on more men, Evan me boy,” he explained. “ See the village men. If what I hear is true, they’ll be only too glad of the work. Seems the Trents only employ a few now and the next estate – Lord Lynwood’s, is it?”

  Evan nodded.

  “Well, he employs men from his own village – Amberly. Is that right?”

  “Yes, but I’d have thought he’d have employed Abbeyford men on the land Lord Royston left his daughter Francesca.”

  “Is that the pretty girl with an older but still lovely lady I see riding about in a foine carriage?”

  “Aye. Lady Lynwood and her daughter. They were lookin’ for you some time back.”

  “Were dey now? Now isn’t that the greatest shame I missed meeting them? But, then, they can’t hold a candle to me darlin’ Carrie’s lovely face. Ah – if she had dose fine clothes an’ a carriage, wouldn’t she be the grand lady too, I’m t’inkin’?”

  “Takes more’n clothes and carriages to make a lady of someone,” Evan growled, bitterness clouding his eyes. “Takes birth and breeding.”


  Foster laughed. “An’ what would me navvy ganger be worryin’ about that for, eh?”

  “There’s things you dunna know, Foster, even yet!” Abruptly, Evan Smithson changed the subject. “I’ll see the village men – but then what?”

  “We divide the men into three gangs. One lot to continue working on the flat bed where we are now, one lot to begin work on the embankment and the third gang to work a cutting through that little incline between the two. That’ll not take as long to do as the embankment in the valley and by the time that’s finished the line should be nearly ready to join up.”

  Evan thought rapidly. He could not fault the scheme but he knew he would be hard pressed to keep tight control over three gangs of navvies working some three miles apart. As if reading his thoughts, Foster said, “Start training two or three to take over as gangers soon. I plan to see this little scheme started and see you have no problems but I’ll be away with me lovely bride before it’s done.”

  Evan found that Foster had spoken the truth about the Abbeyford men. Many were unemployed now and bitterness against the Trents – Squire Trent especially, since it was his gambling debts which had caused their possessions to dwindle – was growing.

  “Aw, Evan lad,” Joby Robinson, son of the village smithy whom he’d known in boyhood, greeted him. “The years ’ave proved you right. We should have won our battle all them years ago, not given in just because Wallis Trent called out the yeomanry. Lad, if we’d tried again after he was killed, we’d ’ ave won! But you’d gone – disappeared.”

  “Aye, I thought it best. I thought I’d not be welcome after the bloodshed that night.”

  “Aye, well, ’appen. Straight after, we was all bitter – that’s true. But we’re worse off now than ever.”

  Evan grinned. “Well – I’ve work for as many as wants it.”

  “Aw, lad, that’s great.”

  “It’s hard graft, mind,” Evan warned, “ and since I’m boss, I’ll not stand for shirkers.”

  “They’ll come, we’ll all come, lad, and thank you for it.”

  So the Abbeyford men – the unemployed, that is – from at first resenting the encroaching railway, now seized upon its arrival as a gift from God. Hungry mouths could be fed once more and a man could have back his pride he had felt to be lost. Yet those who still worked on the Trents’ land saw the railway as a further threat to their already insecure livelihood and began to look upon those village men who had become gangers as turncoats.

  Abbeyford became a divided village.

  There were just two matters left to settle before the new workings could actually begin – the acquisition of part of the Trents’ lands, indeed the majority of the land still left in their possession, and Foster’s acquisition of Carrie Smithson in exchange for giving Evan Smithson the rest of the contract.

  The first came about quite easily, for Foster had prepared well in advance for that very event, though the aftermath was to cause such a turbulence that the ripples would be felt for years to come.

  Foster had joined a card school where Squire Trent frequently played. By making himself a good friend to the drink-sodden, sad old man, Lloyd Foster had by now manoeuvred him into a helpless position. To repay his gambling debts to Foster, Squire Trent was obliged to sell off yet more of his land. And with Foster’s blarney he made it seem as if he were doing the old man a favour instead of a disastrous disservice.

  “Didn’t I tell you I could do it?” Lloyd Foster boasted, waving a piece of paper under Evan’s nose. “An’ all legal-like too!”

  “How much have you got?” Evan’s eyes gleamed as he grabbed the paper out of Foster’s fingers and scanned it eagerly.

  “My God!” he exclaimed when he saw the figures written there. “Twice as much acreage as I thought you’d get and at half the price I thought you’d have to pay!” He looked up at Foster admiringly. “ You crafty devil!” he grinned.

  Foster laughed and slapped Evan on the back. “An’ it’s all in your hands now, me boy. ‘Course the land belongs to the Railway Board, they laid out the money, you know that, don’t you?”

  Evan nodded. “Of course.”

  “And now,” Foster said softly, “ the contract’s yours.”

  “The Board agreed, then?”

  “They did too. When I saw them in Manchester last week about that,” he jabbed his forefinger at the paper Evan still held, “I told them I was wantin’ to spread me wings and fly like an eagle.”

  “And they let you go – without working out your contract?” Evan showed surprise.

  “Didn’t I tell them you were me right-hand man, that you knew as much about the building of dis railroad as me, and that, as long as the engineer checks everything, they’ll have their railroad on schedule, if not before? By the way, they want to see you next week – just to make it all official.”

  Evan nodded. He’d had little cause in his life to thank any man for favours, and now he found his gratitude to this man impossible to express. But the irrepressible Irishman needed no thanks. “An’ you’ll not be forgetting your side of the bargain, now, will you, me boy?” For a moment, beneath the banter, there was the hint of steel.

  “No – no,” Evan said swiftly, trying to sound reassuring, but even he could not be sure his wayward daughter would comply.

  During the first weeks of autumn Carrie and Jamie, locked in the bliss of their growing love, each living only for the next moment when they would meet and touch and hold each other close, had been oblivious of the world around them. For Carrie it was an escape from the harsh reality she knew into a dream of tenderness and joy she had never believed could exist. Even Jamie, entranced by Carrie – this wild beauty like no other girl he had ever known – forgot, for a time, his drunken grandfather, his sullen employees, the dwindling estate, and the threatening railway over the hill.

  Now, cruel reality was crowding in upon their private world.

  It was pay-out night and the navvies descended into Abbeyford like a band of marauding Red Indians. They wanted liquor and because Lloyd Foster was an employer who believed that he could extract better work from his men by giving them what they wanted from time to time he had arranged that a quantity of ale was on hand.

  So it was a drunken, rowdy mob who ran, whooping and yelling, down the hillside into the peaceful village below, looking for sport of any kind. They were rough, tough men who worked hard and played hard too.

  “Come on out, you village wenches,” shouted one banging on the door of a cottage, whilst behind the door a mother clasped her young daughters to her, her eyes wide with fear. “Hush,” she whispered fearful that the girls’ terrified whimperings would be heard. “ Be quiet and he’ll go away.”

  After a few moments, unable to gain any response, the navvy staggered round to the rear of the cottage, where he found half a dozen hens in a run.

  “Aha, lookee what we have here. You’ll mek me a foine dinner, I’m thinkin’,” and he began to chase the birds, which, feathers flying, ran hither and thither, squawking loudly.

  “Come here, blast you, you silly critters,” he muttered rolling from side to side, making feeble grasping movements.

  “What is it you’re doin’, Joseph me boy?”

  Three more navvies, hearing the commotion, had gravitated towards the noise and now stood, a little unsteadily, watching their friend.

  “Tryin’ to catch dees stupid birds, so I am!”

  “Well, let us be helpin’ you.” And the three of them climbed into the chicken run. Drunk though the men were, the chickens were no match for four pairs of grasping hands and very soon all six birds lay in a twitching heap, their necks broken.

  “Now – der’s one each for us and two over – is dat right? We can sell them other two, I’m t’inkin’.”

  “Aye an’ do you know what I’m t’inkin’, Joseph?”

  “No, Michael, and what might dat be?”

  “If dis ’ere cottage has chickens, maybe der’s others in the vil
lage too, eh? What d’you t’ink?”

  Joseph blinked, swaying on his feet.

  “I t’ink you could be right. Come on.”

  Between the four of them they killed fifty-four chickens that night and carried them off in sacks up the hill back to the dwelling-place.

  Another small group of navvies smashed the windows of the Monks Arms because the landlord refused to serve them any more ale. So they hurled stones at his windows and then burst into the bar and helped themselves. With even more drink inside them they rampaged down the one village street, tearing up plants from the gardens, damaging fences and gates and hurling stones through windows. Not until dawn began to stretch its pale fingers over the skyline did the navvies stagger back up the hill.

  The following afternoon Carrie waited in the abbey ruins for Jamie. She shivered and drew her tattered shawl more closely about her. It was a blustery, cool day with grey clouds scudding overhead.

  She saw him approach and ran to meet him as he tethered his horse and dismounted.

  “Oh, Jamie – is it only yesterday since I saw you? It seems so long ago.” She flung herself against him and as he put his arms about her she could feel a fierceness in his embrace. She raised her head to look up at him. His eyes were dark with anger and his mouth was set in a hard line.

  “Jamie, what is it? Something’s wrong, I know it.”

  Jamie tried to smile. “ ’Tis naught to do with you, sweetheart. It’s those – those railway workers.”

  Carrie stiffened and her heart missed a beat. Sure though she was now of Jamie’s love for her, still she had not been able to bring herself to tell him of her own connection with the railway. She had not dared to risk spoiling their idyllic happiness.

  “What – what has happened?”

  “They descended on Abbeyford village last night, an unruly mob!” He clenched his teeth. “ They’ve caused damage to property and stolen hens and frightened the women and girls half out of their wits.”

  “Was – was anyone hurt?”