The muttering and murmuring was growing when, from a door that connected with the schoolmaster’s but-and-ben, Hugh appeared with another two men. He stood silently for a few seconds surveying the gathering and this was a Hugh she had never seen before. Now his dark face looked determined and it made his alien gypsy blood very evident. Then he spoke…
‘There’s no use you all just grumbling and groaning,’ he said in a loud voice. ‘There’s no good making speeches to each other and drawing up useless petitions. In the south they’ve taken up their cudgels, they’ve rioted, they’re out breaking windows, they’ve even dragged dukes off their horses…’
The crowd gasped at the enormity of that idea!
‘That’s what we want to do. We want to show that we’ve been treated like dogs for too long. We’re labourers, at the mercy of the men who hire us and we trust to luck that they’ll be men with a sense of fair play and honesty. But you know and I know that they’re not all like that.
‘There’s many rogues among them, men who cheat us and swindle us, who treat us with less consideration than they treat their dogs and horses. Don’t stand for it. Fight back. If we were all to stop working, we’d have better wages pretty soon. If we were to stop working the bondage system wouldn’t last. Who among you doesn’t think it a sin for a man to have to find a bondager to work in the fields with him? He has to pay her wages, he has to keep a stranger woman in his house, because without her he can’t get a job. That way farmers get two pairs of hands for the price of one!’
An old woman in the middle of the crowd raised her voice at this. ‘It’s just as bad for us bondagers. We don’t like it either. We’d rather be free to make our own bargains with the farmers but the way it is now we’re cheated and ill treated by two masters.’
But the audience were men and they had little time for women’s complaints. Some of them shouted the old woman down.
Hugh went on, raising his voice above the uproar, ‘Don’t worry, old woman, if the bondage was done away with you could make your own bargains. What we want to make sure is that the farmers and the landowners know how we feel about bondage and about many other things. We want decent housing; we want decent wages; we want decent working hours.
‘They keep us out in the fields till after midnight at harvest time without extra pay – and if the farmer sends out a bottle of whisky to the men to make them work harder, they cheer him! He should be paying for the hours they work, not numbing their minds with whisky. And look at the houses you all live in. The pigs in their styes and the cows in the byres have better cover against the weather. Their roofs don’t leak; their walls keep out the winds – yet your houses are neither watertight nor windproof. Don’t stand for it. Fight back.’
An old man called, ‘And how do you suggest we fight back, gypsy?’
Hugh’s black eyes were flashing. ‘Don’t work, lean on your hoes and your spades. Don’t harness your horses in the morning. If you all do that, the farmers will have to make things better. They can’t and won’t work the land on their own. And if that doesn’t work, there are other things we can do – you know that as well as me. They’ve done it in the south.’
But the crowd was unconvinced. One man yelled out, ‘Aye, and they’ve gone to Botany Bay for their trouble!’
Everyone had grumbles but they were timid and afraid. Aylie sat still in her seat as the meeting broke up and she heard people saying to each other as they left, ‘And who’ll feed my bairns if I’ve no money coming in? What’s to stop the farmer going out and hiring another man? Where would I be then without a house or a penny in my pocket?’
What she had heard was a revelation to Aylie. It summed up everything she had dimly felt throughout her childhood and adolescence: the perception of the differences imposed on people by their class; the realization of the lack of hope for betterment that afflicted the people she knew. Even her mother, the woman she most admired in the world, was an acquiescent bond slave, tied to her toil without hope of anything better. In time, Aylie would be the same – unless, unless, unless what? She could not visualize any alternative.
She remembered the well-off men and women she had seen while hunting the Colonel’s horses. They had the same bodies as the men and women with whom she worked but their lives were so different that they could have been the inhabitants of another world. If they got wet or cold while out with the hounds, they went home to hot baths and attentive servants. They had no perception of what it was like to be wet, cold and hungry day after day after day. If they endured bad weather while hunting, that was sport to them, but they did not know what it was to face the cutting wind and driving rain in order to earn enough money to put a basic meal in your belly; to sleep crowded together on hay-filled mattresses covered with threadbare blankets.
Hugh’s speech had fired her, he had wakened her up to the injustices around her. She felt as angry and as desperate as he had looked when he stood addressing the crowd. Then he had been transformed from the teasing, idle gypsy into something else, a man with a purpose. He had made one convert to his cause.
She was the last person left in the room and as he glanced across at her, he was struck by the animation of her face.
I don’t want this, he told himself. I don’t want to have anything to do with her. I’ve got too much to do.
The first time he saw her she was only a child coping with a difficult horse, and even then her face had caught his attention because it was so alive and vibrant. Tonight he saw that though she had been soaked by the rain and her clothes were plain she did not look like a bondager but a high-born lady, the lady he had teased her about being when he met her in the stables in Maryfield.
He could not resist calling out to her in his old teasing way, ‘Come on, little lady, come down here and tell me what you thought about our meeting.’
She gathered her rough, mud-hemmed skirt in one hand and stepped between the benches. ‘I thought you were marvellous,’ she said, ‘but you know you’ll never get them to do anything. I hope you know that.’
‘Would you do anything if you could?’ Her intensity struck home with him. He could see he had impressed her.
‘I’d do anything I could. I think the way many of us live is foul. I think we’re fools to put up with it.’
He was completely the teasing gypsy again, head on one side, confident and very male. ‘Foul, fools… good words, I’ll remember them next time. Come on, it’s dark and raining. I’ll see you get back to Myreheugh without falling into a bog.’
Of course he had a horse, he never seemed to go anywhere without a horse. It was tied up in the schoolmaster’s byre and when he climbed into the saddle, he put down a hand for her to climb up behind him. It was good to be on a horse again and she sat on the crupper with her arms wrapped tightly round his waist. Then the two of them took off at a hard canter which rapidly developed into a gallop.
They sped through the darkness and she clung close to him, feeling the muscles of his back beneath her own body. He was wildly conscious of her too, and as if to deny his feelings he began to whoop and yell like a madman as they tore along the rutted road and eventually into the yard of Myreheugh. Then with an upraising of his hand, he reined in the sweating horse. When he handed her down to the ground, he lightly printed a kiss on her lips with one of his fingers.
‘One day you’ll be quite a woman,’ he told her. ‘Don’t forget what you heard tonight. We’re going to fight them.’
Again he disappeared out of her life for many weeks but she was too abstracted by work and other worries to brood about it much. She had gone home to see her mother the Sunday after listening to Hugh speak and was concerned to realize how much pain Jane was suffering from what she called the rhematicks in her hands. Aylie took them in her own and gently caressed them. They were covered with the fingerless woollen gloves that her mother had taken to wearing all the time.
‘Do you wear those pokies on your hands every day, even when it’s sunny and warm?’ she asked.
>
Jane nodded and silently peeled off the pokies, holding out her hands towards her daughter. They were misshapen and horribly swollen, each finger joint red and almost visibly throbbing.
Aylie was full of pity for her mother’s pain. ‘Oh, how they must hurt you! Oh, Mam, they’re so swollen.’
Jane’s hands lay in hers, trustfully like the hands of a child, and Jane nodded. ‘Yes, they’re sore. But it’s worse when the weather’s cold or when it’s raining.’
Aylie looked at the enlarged knuckle joints and the paper-thin skin. She could almost feel the throbbing pain of it herself. ‘Have you done anything about it?’ she asked.
Her mother grimaced. ‘I’m not much of a recommendation for my own cures, am I? I’m trying out some of my mother’s recipes. She prescribed onion wine… in her notes she said it makes people live a long time, but it doesn’t help my hands. I’ve tried drinking pansy water but you have to take a lot of it, several pints a day, and wild pansies are hard to find round here. The best thing I’ve found is dried meadowsweet because it helps to kill the pain, especially at night when it stops me sleeping.’
Aylie remembered Hugh’s impassioned speech about the rigours of labouring life and she said angrily, ‘You shouldn’t have to work so hard. You should be living a quieter life, not going out in the cold and the wet. That’s for young people like me.’
Jane gave her lovely giggle. ‘Oh, bairn, I’m not ancient, you know. I’m just forty-one. But I know that I can’t go on in the fields much longer. The pain and the swelling is in my knees and my feet too, now. Soon I’ll not be able to bend, perhaps not be able to walk very far.’
The girl was terrified by this information. ‘Oh Mam, what’re you going to do?’
‘You know Jock Hepburn? He wanted to marry me when I was young but I wouldn’t have him. Well, he says he’ll take me on as a servant in his house. I like his wife and his bairn and it wouldn’t be hard work, but I’m not going to presume on Jock’s old love for me and I don’t want Flora to feel jealous. No, I’ve decided to set myself up as a howdie and a healer like my mother was. There’s plenty of people come to me for cures and I’m getting better at it all the time. I’m going to do that, Aylie.’
This sounded like a good idea except for one thing. Aylie asked the question that came first to her mind: ‘But where will you live? You’ll need a house.’
Jane smiled. ‘I’ve thought of that too. I’m going back to live in Charterhall.’
‘In Charterhall? But will they let you? Old Glendinning’s still alive, isn’t he? You’ll have to ask permission to live there.’
Jane drew herself up proudly. ‘Does a Cannon of Charterhall have to ask permission to live there? We were in Charterhall before the Glendinnings ever heard of the place. Besides, the old man’s dead. He died a few weeks ago and they say his heir’s a nephew who lives in London and won’t be coming up here very often. No, I’m just going to move in and see if anybody tries to shift me. I don’t think they will somehow.’
* * *
‘Tell me what’s wrong. I know something’s worrying you,’ Aylie pleaded with Phemie as they worked together in the dairy, churning away at a large wooden tub of buttermilk which was taking an inordinately long time to set. The weather was thundery, which explained the milk’s reluctance, Aylie knew. She wished she could remember the charm her mother used to chant over slow-to-set butter, but all that came to mind were the first words of the incantation: ‘Brownie, brownie tak tent wi’ me…’ And obviously those were not enough.
Phemie drooped languidly at her side, face whiter than before and eyes anguished. For several nights now Aylie had heard muffled sobs coming from the bed where the other girl and the cook slept. It was not the cook who was crying, for she slept in snoring oblivion and never heard anything. Generous helpings of the mistress’ brandy made her sleep deep.
‘There’s nothing wrong,’ said Phemie, leaning back against the marble slab of the dairy shelf as if she were in danger of fainting. She was obviously lying.
‘Then why do you cry yourself to sleep every night?’ asked Aylie.
‘I don’t, you must have been dreaming. Oh, Aylie, don’t speak about it, will you? Don’t tell anyone.’
‘Tell anyone what? Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong, Phemie?’
But the other girl just put her hands over her eyes and sobbed, ‘Oh leave me alone. Don’t ask so many questions.’ Then she turned and ran from the dairy.
She was ill, decided Aylie, she was in the grip of one of those wasting diseases that carried off so many people with Phemie’s waxy-white skin and thin frame. Girls who worked on the land, though they had to endure hard conditions, did not suffer from the ravages of consumption as much as those who were shut up indoors.
She ran after her friend and said, ‘Would you like me to ask my mother for a medicine for you?’
To her surprise Phemie became instantly defensive. ‘There’s nothing wrong with me. What sort of medicine could your mother give me?’
Aylie soothed her. ‘Any sort you like – you tell me what ails you and my mother’ll be able to treat it. I’m sure she will.’
A mixture of emotions showed on Phemie’s face – doubt, hope and finally the old suspicious despair again. ‘There’s no medicine can help me, I’ll just have to get better in my own way.’
Her weakness did not escape the eagle eye of the mistress, who continually scolded the girl and threatened to send her home to her father.
‘He’ll not be too glad to have you back. He was keen enough for us to take you,’ she threatened.
Phemie hung her head, pleading, ‘Oh, don’t send me home, Mistress. Please don’t send me home.’
Her reprieve was accompanied by a slap on the face from the tight-lipped, bullying woman and an admonition to pull herself together if she did not want to be sent away.
‘Why don’t you want to go home? Any place must be better than this hole. When my bond is up, I’m going,’ Aylie told her friend that night as they sat together on the orchard wall and watched iridescent mayflies dancing over the surface of the burn that ran past the house.
Phemie turned on her angrily. ‘Oh, stop bothering me, Aylie Cannon. You think you know everything but you don’t know anything at all, do you?’ She looked accusingly at her friend. ‘You’ve been lucky. You’ve been brought up by a mother who loves you, you don’t know anything.’
Aylie bridled. At twenty she thought herself very worldly wise. She and her mother had no secrets from each other and she had not been brought up in the atmosphere of mystery and ignorance that other girls suffered. Many times she’d had to explain menstruation or the mysteries of childbirth to girls who had no idea of the facts of life, for Jane had talked to her daughter as an equal from her earliest years and was unusual in that she always enlightened the child on any question she cared to ask.
‘Don’t be silly. I bet I know more about things than you do,’ she replied defensively.
‘You don’t. I can tell you that. You just don’t.’ Phemie laughed a strange bitter laugh.
Angrily Aylie turned away from her and stared out towards the hills. On the horizon she could just make out the tops of the triple peaks of her mother’s beloved Eildons. At their foot Jane would be preparing for the night in Charterhall where she had moved into the little cell, transforming it into a home. Aylie could imagine her spreading Blaize’s coat on top of her bed, boiling a can of water on the fire in the primitive fireplace that filled the place with smoke when she lit it. Jock Hepburn had manufactured a chimney to stick out through a hole in the wall but it coped with only half the smoke.
The love she felt for her mother softened the girl’s heart so much that she forgot her resentment against Phemie and turning back again, put an arm round her waist.
‘You sound as if you know some terrible things,’ she comforted her.
At this Phemie sobbed heart-brokenly and through the racking sound of her grief, she asked Aylie, ‘Can’t you
guess why I don’t want to go home? Can’t you guess why I’d do anything rather than be sent back to my father?’
A presagement of terrible knowledge made Aylie feel suddenly cold. She shook her head. ‘No, I can’t…’
‘Then I’ll tell you.’ Phemie sat up straight on the wall and looked at her friend. Her face was hard and bitter. ‘My father treats me like a wife. My mother died when I was seven years old and ever since then he’s slept with me, he’s used me as his wife. I couldn’t do anything to stop him. And I can never tell anyone about it because I know they’d blame me. Oh, I feel so guilty.’
Aylie felt sick. She remembered the mild-mannered old tailor, who was treated with such deference by the cottager women. Many a widow had set her cap at him but they said he was so devoted to the memory of his dead wife that he’d never marry again. She thought of the times he had sat on the table in Archie’s cottage and sewed while she watched the swiftly flying needle with admiration. Yet this man had done such terrible things to his daughter!
She cuddled the weeping girl for comfort. ‘Oh, poor Phemie. You’re not to blame. It’s your father who’s committed a mortal sin. You should go and tell the minister.’
Phemie raised her tearstained face. ‘Would he believe me? I tell you he wouldn’t. My father’s a church elder, a respected man. Anyway I couldn’t bear to talk about it, I couldn’t bear to tell people what’s happened. You’re the only person I’ve ever told. And even if they did believe me, what would happen to him? They’d send him to prison, wouldn’t they? He’s my father after all. I couldn’t do that to my own father…’
‘Then if you won’t do anything about it, you must try to forget it because thinking about it all the time is making you ill. You’re looking terrible. Just remember you’re safe here. He can’t get at you now. You’ve got to try to start a new life for yourself. Just do what the mistress tells you and she’ll keep you on.’
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