But she soon forgot even him. She forgot everything in the excitement of the chase. They ran well that day, yelling through the coverts and bursting out of the bracken in full cry. When the hounds eventually made a kill, she was the only woman up with the leaders, mud-splashed and panting but looking as beautiful as Diana.
Her bones ached as she rode into the yard and she felt so stiff from the headlong ride that when she flung herself out of the saddle, she staggered. Now she felt like Cinderella when the ball was over. She was a stable girl again.
Humming softly, she worked over the tired horse, soothing her and rubbing her down gently, cleaning the mud off her flanks and finally giving her a steaming-hot bran mash. Finally she hauled a bucket of water into the box and closed the door, shooting home its big bolt.
At that instant she heard a noise in the box next door and realized that she was not alone, for in the dimness she could see the figure of a man sitting on a pile of horse blankets.
‘My word, aren’t you a grand-looking lady,’ he said in a softly teasing tone, ‘but they tell me you’re only a bondager’s bairn.’
She bristled. She hated being called a bondager’s bairn. ‘So what? My mother’s a bondager but that doesn’t mean I’m some sort of animal, does it? Your father’s a groom, what does that make you?’
He laughed and came out of the box into the passageway. In doing so he passed a hand over the muzzle of the listening mare and she noticed that he unconsciously made this gesture with the same sort of tender affection as she would have done herself.
‘One to you. Of course it doesn’t matter,’ he agreed. ‘I just think you look very fine. I like a fine-looking girl. You’ve heard the song “The Lady and the Gypsy”, haven’t you?’
She looked at him harder. It was easy to tell this man was a gypsy, but it was not only his swarthy skin and curling dark hair that gave him away, it was his effrontery as well.
He introduced himself. ‘I’m Gilbert Kennedy’s son. My name’s Hugh.’
‘I know who you are,’ she said, sweeping past him, ‘and if you don’t mind I’ve got to go and get changed out of all this finery into a bondager bairn’s clothes again.’
* * *
Madeleine’s suitor was brought to the point of proposing in the summer of 1830 and their marriage was set for that autumn, after the harvest had been gathered in and before her father’s new hunting season began.
The ceremony and a lavish reception for guests from all over the country was to be at Maryfield. On the night before the wedding, the Colonel threw a party for all the servants and workers on the estate. Tables covered with food and bottles were set out in the barn and a fiddle band was hired to provide the music.
They ate and they drank; they toasted the bride and groom and most of all they toasted their favourite, the Colonel, who sat beaming at the top table. Then they all danced. Aylie, sitting with her mother at the back of the barn, was astonished to see Hugh Kennedy, who should by rights not have been there at all, walk up to the top table and proffer his hand to Madeleine. She looked astonished but on such an occasion she could not refuse to dance with him, though both her father and her insipid blond groom looked thoroughly disapproving of his cheek.
The couple took the floor – Madeleine large, blonde and highly coloured like one of the cream-filled puddings that the Maryfield cook had provided for the feast; Hugh needle-sharp, dark-haired, brown-skinned and dangerous. It was obvious that by asking the bride to dance he was making a point and everyone in the barn, including his mortified father, knew it.
Poor Madeleine, not a sensitive woman, knew she was being used. But she kept her dignity and when the music stopped she curtsied stiffly before he handed her back to the top table. He walked back to his own seat with a smile, and Aylie heard her mother take a sharp intake of breath. She remembered Jane’s warning words: ‘Gypsies are dangerous.’
The trouble was that, after her adventures on the hunting field, Aylie had acquired a taste for danger and when Hugh came up to ask her to dance she leapt to her feet eagerly – too eagerly, her mother thought.
Hugh was a wonderful dancer, nimble on his feet and bold with his eyes, and he made Aylie feel like a woman, and a desirable woman too. She forgot her still knobbly knees and skinny arms; she forgot her lack of a decent bust and her boyish hips; her childish awkwardness fell away when she was in his arms.
As he released her from the spell after the last bar of music he held on to her hand for a brief moment and said, ‘You’re almost as good on the dance floor as you are on a horse. You’re a funny little thing, aren’t you?’
‘I’m not so little,’ she said defensively, drawing herself up to her full five foot five inches, and he laughed, showing his magnificent teeth.
‘I’ll come back for you when you’ve grown up then,’ he said, and disappeared into the throng.
* * *
With the marriage and departure of Madeleine, the Colonel grew even more lax and indulgent in his manner of treating his servants. The house more or less ran itself; the butler helped himself to the Colonel’s port and the maids grew fat on the cook’s dishes. In the stables Gilbert was more master than his employer, and when the Colonel was looking for a second whip in the winter of 1832, he suggested that there was no need to bring in another man when they had Aylie.
This time there was no objection from Colonel Scroggie. His only stipulation was that she could not be kitted out in a pink coat. She was to dress like a lady in order to avoid scandal.
* * *
On a cold, dull day in December two years later Aylie, on a fidgety grey gelding, was scrambling after the Colonel over the most slippery slope of the Black Hill. They had been hunting the pack for over an hour and hadn’t yet managed to raise a scent, for the wind was high and any traces a fox left behind were blown away very quickly.
‘We’ll draw that covert down there, there’s sometimes a fox in it,’ he shouted back to her, gesturing with his whip hand at a clump of trees below them. She collected her reins and, holding the horse in tight, for it tended to be loose footed, slid rather than walked down the slope. The Colonel was waiting for her at the bottom.
‘You go to the far side and keep a watch,’ he instructed, ‘I’ll hunt them from the back.’
None of the other hunt followers had managed to keep up with them and they were on their own, with the questing hounds rushing to and fro in search of a scent.
The Colonel urged them into the patch of scrubby trees while Aylie cantered round to the back of the covert, where she sat easily in the saddle waiting for them to re-emerge. Within a very short time she was rewarded for, heads down and baying, the hounds burst out almost under her nose after a flying red streak, Mr Fox. In full cry, headed by old Warrior, the hounds took off across the slope of the nearest field and disappeared over the horizon. Rising in her saddle and giving a shrill scream, Aylie swung her horse round and followed them at full gallop, her blood up.
It was a good scent and the fox was only just in front of the hounds as they ran on for over two miles, baying savagely as they went. Aylie, jubilant, rode on their tails and when she glanced over her shoulder she could see the Colonel on his big bay closing in on her fast. By the time they reached a big hedge that marked the main road, they were riding shoulder to shoulder. When the Colonel’s horse saw the size of the obstacle, however, he suddenly turned his head, stuck in his toes and refused to take it.
His rider, mortified and scarlet in the face, laid into the horse with his whip while calling to Aylie, ‘You set your horse at it. He’ll follow you over.’
The hedge was high and Aylie knew that on the other side was a deep, water-filled ditch. It would be necessary to make the horse spread itself wide to get across it. Purposefully she wheeled the grey to the right, rode a short way hack across the field and then, with deliberation, swung round again in a canter, gathering the horse together as she set it at the hedge. Both she and the horse knew that they were risking their necks
and she was only too aware of the huge effort that was necessary. Her urgency communicated itself to her mount as, heads down, they raced towards the hedge that looked bigger and bigger the closer it got. In the final approach she felt the animal gather itself together under her legs, change its stride on the approach and then launch itself bravely into the sky. Not for the first time she was awed by the boldness and bravery of a horse and after what seemed like an eternity, they landed safely on the other side. The horse slid on to its belly in the mud but Aylie clung to its neck and kept her seat. They were over! They’d made it!
Jubilantly grinning, she looked back over her shoulder and saw the girth-ringed belly of the Colonel’s horse rising into the air. Then as she watched, it buckled at the knees on landing and fell on its side; she saw the anguished expression on the Colonel’s face as he hit the ground and she heard the terrible thump and groan as the wind was driven out of the horse’s belly.
Under her horrified stare, they lay still on the grass, sprawled with legs in all directions and heads lolling. The chase and the baying hounds were forgotten as she turned her horse to gallop back to where the Colonel lay like a red-coated rag doll on the muddy bank.
* * *
The death of Colonel Scroggie meant the end of the good days for everyone on Maryfield. Safe in her elegant mansion on the other side of the country, Madeleine was anxious to be rid of her Borders property quickly, and it was sold to a hard-eyed farmer who gave all the workers their notice. It was reckoned to be a bad move to retain old staff when a property changed hands because they were always sunk in old ways and the people at Maryfield had enjoyed the good life too long, said the farmers round about. It was time they got back to real work and hard living.
Archie and Bertha, downcast, packed up their things once again and prepared to take themselves off to the poor’s house. They were growing grey now; all their children had left home and they had saved nothing from their years of toil. They knew they were too old to find another place. Jane, anguished, faced up to the fact that she would have to go to another hiring fair. The memory of her only experience at Earlston was still vivid and painful.
Aylie was simply confused. She did not know what was happening and she was so traumatized by the memory of the Colonel’s dead body beside his mortally injured horse that she could no longer ride, far less face another headlong chase after hounds.
Once again moving day was to be 12 May, but before that they all had to find other places. Where were they to go?
Aylie had never stood at a hiring fair but she had heard her mother’s story often enough. Fair day always seemed to be cold and wet, and this year was no exception for it was raining and the wind was howling just as fiercely as it had on the day Jane first went there. Jane looked bent and ill. She was going to be old soon, her daughter realized for the first time, and the thought gave her a frisson of terror. She could not envisage a life without her mother.
She noticed that Jane’s hands, once so slender and adroit, were now swollen and red. They had been giving her much pain, which she tried unsuccessfully to hide from her daughter but, more successfully, from anyone who might be prepared to offer her a position.
Farming was better that year, the economy was on the rise and there had been a good harvest, so farmers had money to spend.
Once again the Red Lion Inn was crowded, and even before nine o’clock drunk men could be seen sprawling along the horseshoe-shaped benches in the public bar, singing, cursing or muttering to themselves.
Jane still stuck to her original specification for a post; it had to be on a place from where she could see the Eildons. Though she was offered work in various places, for she made an impressive figure as she stood like a tall pine tree in the square, she turned them all down. Eventually a middle-aged man in a brown smock came up and asked her terms. When she told him, he appeared satisfied and said, ‘I’ve been hired for Lilybank, it’s changing hands this coming term. Will you come there as my bondager?’
She looked hard at him. ‘You’re not needing a wife?’
He shook his head.
‘I’ll not share your bed, you know.’
He shook his head again. ‘That’s all right. It won’t be necessary.’
‘In that case, I’ll take your job.’
The main reason she’d agreed was because Lilybank was the next farm to Charterhall.
Jane shouldered her way through the crowds in Earlston square, looking for her daughter. All around her were excited groups of men and women, standing chattering in the middle of the square or clustered around lines of stalls selling bits of pottery, squares of jaw-clamping toffee, gingerbread and sugar-plum cake. She rushed past squatting peddlers displaying swatches of brightly coloured material, Kerseymere shawls and bundles of multi-coloured ribbons. One of them was the old peddler who had sold her the sea-green material for her gown, and though she nodded and smiled to him, she did not stop.
There were labourers offering roughly carved dolls and spinning tops that they had made during their meagre leisure hours to the other farm workers trailing around the fair with gaggles of children. An Aunt Sally stall with grinning heads waiting to be knocked down by muscle-armed rustics was doing brisk business. She was held up by a throng of people listening to a loud-voiced busker yelling out the attractions on show inside his flag-hung tent: ‘Come in, come, pay your threepence and see the bearded woman, the two-headed calf and’ – dramatic pause – ‘the mermaid’s baby. It was born with fins instead of arms, folks!’
People jostled past her with their coins held out, but even if she had been interested in the display, which she was not, Jane wouldn’t have stopped because she had to find Aylie. She searched through the tight-packed throng in the hall and was heading for the Red Lion when, outside the bar door, she found Aylie talking to Gilbert Kennedy. Her depression seemed to have been lifted and her eyes were bright and her face once again alive and youthful because of the excitement of the occasion.
Jane grasped her arm gently and said, ‘I’ve got a place, it’s at Lilybank on the other side of Charterhall. Do you want me to try to get you fixed up there as well? They might still be looking for more bondagers.’
Aylie smiled at her mother. ‘Oh, I’m glad you’re fixed up, Ma. Lilybank marches with the Hepburns’ place on the other side, doesn’t it? You’ll be with all your old friends. Don’t worry about me, Gilbert here was just telling me about a job at a place near Jeddart.’
‘Jeddart!’ gasped Jane.
Local people always named the town of Jedburgh as Jeddart. Though it was only about fifteen miles away, Aylie might as well have told her mother that she was planning to go to London.
The girl knew the reason for her mother’s consternation. ‘Don’t worry, it’s on this side of Jeddart. I won’t be so far away. Anyway I mightn’t take it, I’ve got to speak to the steward first.’
She did not tell her mother that she felt a great need to move out of the tight five-mile radius in which she had lived her life. She wanted to be independent and no longer Jane Cannon’s bairn, as everyone at Maryfield knew her. Like so many young people since time began, she longed to see more of the world and, for her, going to Jedburgh was almost as adventurous as someone else with a wider horizon setting sail for Canada.
When Gilbert had told her about the possible job and added, ‘My son Hugh thought you might like it over there. It’s grand open country on the top of the hills and he knows some of the people on the farm,’ that made her eager to seal the bargain even though, when she spoke to the farm steward, she found him a surly and unfriendly man. She saw doubts on Gilbert’s face as well, but she ignored them.
The steward’s terms seemed fair – the farmer needed a girl to work half the time on the land and the other half in the house. He’d pay tenpence a day for land work and she’d get her keep and three pounds a year for house duties. She accepted his shilling arles and agreed to start at Myreheugh on the moving day in May.
* * *
&
nbsp; The place was well named. The farmhouse huddled defensively in a muddy hollow beside an old humpbacked bridge that carried the ancient Roman road of Dere Street over to the Cheviot Hills. A chill wind seemed to blow all the time at Myreheugh, even when the skies were blue, and it was a grim-looking place, the atmosphere not lightened by the fact that the faces of the people working there were withdrawn and reserved as if, like the house and the farm, they were deeply suspicious of strangers.
With her small trunk Aylie arrived on the carter’s waggon and was told by a hard-faced old cook that she had to sleep in the servants’ room in an attic over the kitchen where the cook herself and the housemaid, Phemie Anderson, also slept.
Aylie heaved her trunk up the narrow stair and was surprised at how small the attic was, hardly bigger than a hen coop and filled by a bed with scanty coverings.
‘I don’t have to share the bed, do I?’ she asked when she came back into the kitchen.
The cook placed her red fists on her hips and demanded, ‘What’s wrong with sharing a bed? Phemie and me are clean.’
‘I don’t want to share a bed,’ said Aylie firmly. ‘I’ll sleep on the floor if necessary.’
‘Then you do that,’ was the cook’s reply. ‘It’s probably what you’re used to.’
Phemie came in during this exchange and listened silently to the two women arguing. She was about the same age as Aylie, but completely different in appearance for she was a white-faced, hunted-looking girl who started in fright every time anyone spoke to her and whose white-lashed, red-rimmed eyes seemed to be perpetually in danger of overflowing with tears. Her only claim to beauty was a long fall of straight yellow hair that she slowly combed out every night before going to sleep.
That night Phemie and the cook, Meg Mather, slept together in the double bed while Aylie was bedded down on a pile of clothes beneath a little window through which a vicious draught howled. She lay on the lumpy bedding and regretted her eagerness to leave her mother, for the atmosphere in Myreheugh had been overall so hostile that she felt bitterly sorry she had not listened to Jane and checked out what the place was like before she agreed to work there. Why had Hugh Kennedy said she’d like it? He must have been playing one of his jokes, like the night he asked Madeleine to dance. Her heart burned with resentment. Just let him wait till she saw him again!
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