It was late afternoon when she saw a horse and rider ford the river and come cantering across the long meadow towards the abbey. The rider set the horse at the moat and it leaped bravely, just missing the top and floundering with threshing legs to mount the slope. It was Aylie on the horse’s back, sitting astride because Hugh had forgotten to bring a side saddle, and her hair was loose and tangled over her shoulders.
She looked as if she had ridden for a long way at breakneck pace. When she came closer her mother saw that she was exhausted and her eyes were red-rimmed as if she had been weeping.
In the cloister yard she leaped from the horse, dropped its reins and ran towards her mother.
‘Oh Mam,’ she cried, ‘oh, Mam, it’s been so terrible! Oh Mam, I need to talk to you.’
Jane held the girl to her, cradling her head with both hands.
‘My cushie doo,’ she whispered soothingly. ‘What’s wrong, what’s happened?’
‘It’s Phemie, I’ve been to see Phemie. They’ll send her to prison. It’s so unfair!’
The news of Phemie murdering her baby had not yet reached Charterhall so Jane was surprised at her daughter’s anguish. ‘Phemie, that’s the girl who works in the house with you… What’s happened to her? Why’s she going to prison?’
In tears Aylie burst out with the story of Phemie’s baby and its murder while Jane continued to hold her in a comforting embrace. As she wept, Aylie said, ‘I should have stayed with her. She wouldn’t have killed it if I’d been there. Now she’s going to prison!’
‘Ssh, ssh,’ soothed the mother while the girl went on, pouring out the sad story, telling about the tailor and his daughter and what she had seen when she went to visit Phemie in Jedburgh jail.
‘Oh, what a terrible place! She’s shut up in a cell all on her own in the gatehouse beside the abbey. She cries all the time and she won’t eat anything. They think she’s gone mad – her father told her he hopes they send her to Bedlam but she’s not mad. She talked to me… She has to talk to someone. I asked her who the father is and, you’ll never guess – it’s the farmer. It’s the man I work for, that horrible, horrible man who’s busy pretending he knows nothing about it and won’t lift a finger to help Phemie. It’s his brother who sits on the bench in Jeddart and he’ll be the one who’s got to decide what’s to happen to her but Myreheugh won’t do anything to help her, not even have a word with his own brother!’
Jane was not surprised for she had been one of the labouring classes too long not to be aware of the ways of the masters. ‘You mustn’t be too upset. They won’t be cruel to her and she did commit murder, you have to admit that.’
‘But Mam, she was desperate, she didn’t know what she was doing. If you could only see her, she’s like a poor wee animal, maddened by fear. Oh, she’s such a timid girl. Going to prison will be the end of her.’
Aylie wept, inconsolable, while her mother, feeling helpless, held her close.
When the sobs began to lessen, Jane said soothingly, ‘Come on inside and have something to eat. What about that horse? You’d better tie it up and let it graze in the meadow. Where did you get it anyway? Is it from the farm?’
Aylie shook her head. ‘No, of course not. Hugh Kennedy lent it to me. It’s a great horse – fast and brave. I’ll rub it down and feed it before I head back to Myreheugh.’
They tied it up with a long rope so that it could graze in the meadow grass and when they were finished, Jane broached the subject that was worrying her even more than Phemie. ‘Do you see much of Kennedy’s son? He’s not good company for a girl like you.’
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them for Aylie stiffened at her side. ‘Oh, don’t you start, Mam. Just because he speaks his mind, lots of people don’t like him. He won’t stand for the things the rest of us stand for, that’s why.’
‘They say he’s a troublemaker, one of those wreckers and thatch burners.’ Jane had heard plenty of tales about Hugh.
‘He believes in every man being equal but he isn’t a wrecker or a thatch burner,’ defended Aylie.
‘I’ve heard tell that he’s one of the Boomer men…’ said Jane.
This was a new one to Aylie. ‘Boomer men? What are they?’
Her mother shrugged. ‘They’re smugglers. They go back and forth to Boulmer on the Northumberland coast – local people call it Boomer and that’s how the smugglers get their name. Lots of wild young lads take up the smuggling and he’s one of them, I’ve heard. If the excise men get him, it’ll be worse than Jedburgh jail for him.’
‘Boomer men…’ Slowly Aylie turned over the words. ‘I’ve never heard of them. But he could be a smuggler, I suppose, he always seems to have money – and horses – but he only works at odd jobs.’
‘Gypsies like him always have money and it doesn’t do to ask where it comes from. Oh, keep away from him, lassie. Gypsies are bad for people who aren’t the same as them. Let gypsies stay with gypsies is what I say.’
On the slow ride back to Myreheugh, Aylie turned over what her mother had said. So Hugh was a smuggler, one of the Boomer men. She was not as shocked as Jane had hoped she would be, in fact she was intrigued. If he was a smuggler, a rebel against authority, he was even more fascinating as far as she was concerned.
Phemie lay in her cell for three weeks before her final appearance before the magistrates. On the morning this was due to take place, a woman came to help her wash and dress. She was a kind woman who combed the girl’s hair gently and whispered, ‘Don’t be frightened, trust in the Lord and He will help you.’
‘Will He?’ Phemie looked desperate. ‘Why should He help me? No one else does.’
The court was crowded but as she was led to the little box above the crowd, she recognized some faces – her father was there, sober and respectable-looking in his best black suit. She looked down at him with loathing. It was all his fault this had happened. The farmer and his grim wife sat together on the front benches, both of them avoiding looking at the girl as she was led in. The presiding magistrate looked exactly like his brother and she shuddered at the sight of him.
The proceedings went by in a sort of dream. They asked her questions. They asked if she had really cut her baby’s throat and she nodded her head.
‘Yes, yes, I cut its throat with one of the knives from the kitchen.’
‘Why did you kill your baby?’ was the next question.
She dropped her eyes to her hands and furrowed her brow, trying very hard to remember why she had killed the child, but no idea came.
It was as if that horrible day had been lived by someone else. All she could remember was her unreasoning terror.
‘I don’t know really, but it looked so ugly and it made such funny noises,’ she finally said.
The judge and the lawyers conferred. Huge books were dragged out and their pages turned. The court was adjourned and she was taken back to her cell. Then in the afternoon they came for her again and, like a wild animal flushed from undergrowth, she blinked as she was led into the bright sunlit courtroom. She did not seem to understand what the judge was saying when he told her that she was a wicked girl, the killer of an innocent child, and that she had to pay the penalty of her crime.
‘You will serve five years’ hard labour in the prison for women in Edinburgh,’ he pronounced, and the court gave back a rustle of approval at this sentence.
Only one dissented. She stood up in the middle of the court and began to shout: ‘You can’t do that! You can’t send her away for five years! Why don’t you ask her who the father of her baby is? Why should he get off scot free while she goes to prison? Why don’t you ask your brother who’s the father…?’
It was Aylie and she was pointing directly at the farmer whose face was flushed to port-wine red and whose mouth was opening and shutting like a stranded fish’s, till it appeared to the onlookers that he was about to have an apoplectic fit.
Aylie was still shouting when two court officials bore down on her and
hustled her out of the courtroom, down the steep stairs into the town square. Shaking her violently, they threw her on to the steps of the market cross and were about to lift her up and shake her again when a group of men came down the court stairway behind them. The new arrivals were all gypsies and they looked very threatening.
‘Leave the girl alone,’ said Hugh Kennedy. ‘Let go of her. Go back into the court and let her be. She won’t make any more noise.’
Then he lifted Aylie up and said, ‘You went a bit too far that time. You could’ve gone to jail with your friend for shouting too much. Come on, I don’t think they’re going to have you back at Myreheugh, so I’ll take you home to your mother.’
* * *
Jane had known this was the day of Phemie’s trial and she could not conceal the relief on her face when she saw Aylie coming up the track riding pillion behind Hugh Kennedy on his black horse. She said no word of reproach nor did she worry that Aylie had lost her job, but bustled about getting them something to eat.
‘I’ll have a word with Jock,’ she said eventually. ‘He could be needing an extra girl for summer work. One of his bondagers died last month and they’ll be needing someone else. They’ll take you, I think.’
Aylie looked at Hugh. Was he going to say anything to stop her taking this job? But he held his tongue so she nodded her head and said, ‘All right, Mam, you can tell Jock I’ll do it if he wants me.’
* * *
‘That gypsy’s courting you,’ Jane told her daughter one winter night after Hugh Kennedy had arrived with a huge bundle of firewood held across the pommel of his saddle and put it down at their door. Her fears were confirmed when she saw a flush rise in Aylie’s cheeks.
‘Oh Mam, he isn’t. He hardly ever comes near me and when he does all he talks to me about is horses.’
‘He’s courting you none the less. He’s stalking you as craftily as he stalks all those hares and pheasants he catches. Watch out for him. I wouldn’t want to see you having to go from house to house selling tin pots and clothes pegs.’
‘Oh, I’d never do that. Anyway he’s not like the other gypsy men. He’s got ambition…’ Aylie protested.
Jane snorted slightly. ‘I’ve heard how his ambition takes him, wandering around the place stirring up people against their masters. He should get himself down to London if he wants to start a revolution.’
It never struck her that Blaize had been a soldier in the army of Revolution. She saw his war as something quite different and resignedly accepted that French ideas of liberty did not apply to people like her and the labourers who iived and worked around her.
As she walked to Jock’s farm next morning in the frosty dawn, Aylie reflected on what her mother had said. She knew full well the reputation of gypsy men for drunkenness, ill treating their women and for dishonesty, but Hugh, she was sure, was something different. His father, Gilbert, was an honourable and well-respected man who had always held down a job, and her memory of an incandescent Hugh vainly urging the farm labourers in the schoolhouse to better themselves, still stayed vividly in her mind. What he had said that night had struck a note in her, he awoke all her latent feelings – not of resentment exactly – but of awareness of the inequalities of life. She was an intelligent girl who chafed at the restraints of life as a bondager, for even though she was lucky enough at the moment to be working in a good place, what assurance did she have that it would last?
‘I might as well be a sheep or a cow, I’m as powerless and as trusting as they are. Even horses are better off than women in this life,’ she told herself, kicking loose stones in front of her with her enormous, hobnailed boots as she walked. What would it be like, she suddenly wondered, to walk in dainty satin shoes? What did it feel like not to have to rise before dawn every day?
As far as Jane’s warning about Hugh courting her was concerned, Aylie was unconvinced. She had seen him only three times since the day at Jedburgh, and that was several months ago. If he was courting her, he was a very dilatory lover.
The ploughing finished and within days a thick blanket of snow covered the ground. There was little work for the farm people so they were put to indoor tasks tidying up the sheds and the yard. Jock was a good employer and did not think it fair to lay his people off without wages if he could help it.
The reflection from the snow outside the barn door dazzled Aylie as she helped with the draught horses, crooning to them as she forked over the straw of their bedding. If the snow did not melt soon, she thought, they’d be as frisky as colts when the time came to take them out again. As she worked she glanced out at the snow through the open door and remembered how she used to play in it as a child, throwing snowballs and making long glassy slides down the bank at the side of the lane. She was only twenty-one years old but childhood and games seemed very far away.
The door creaked further open and a dark figure in a long greatcoat stood silhouetted against the light in the doorway. Hugh’s voice said, ‘You must have time on your hands with all this snow. How do you fancy an outing?’
She slowly leaned on her fork and stared at him. ‘Where to?’ Her voice was cold because he had not been to see her for almost six weeks.
‘What about Coldstream?’
‘What’s on there? It’s a long way to go in this weather.’
‘I’ve got a nice wee pony with a gig out there. We could be at Coldstream in a couple of hours.’
‘I’m not going to Coldstream in this weather. How’s your pony going to get over the roads?’
‘Well, the mail coach is getting through and if it gets through, so will I. We’ll go on the high road. Get your shawl and come to Coldstream with me, Aylie.’
It was the way he almost whispered her name that made her stomach turn over. He was putting her under his old spell again and though she tried to fight it, her protest grew fainter.
‘But why should I want to go to Coldstream?’
He came right into the stable and put his arms round her, pressing her against the thick serge of his shawl-collared coat. ‘We’ll go to Coldstream and get old Patie Mudie to marry us. I’m in a marrying mood today.’
She felt she had gone mad as she sat beside him in the gig, watching the adroit way he handled the reins and cracked the whip over the head of the trotting pony.
‘I can’t get married like this,’ she protested, spreading her hands out over the thick material of her working skirt and sacking apron and indicating her heavy boots. He hadn’t even been prepared to wait while she changed out of her working clothes.
‘Of course you can. The bondager costume suits you, especially that hat. Tie it down with your headcloth so the wind doesn’t have it off your head. I don’t want a bare-headed bride,’ he laughed.
‘I can’t get married without telling my mother,’ was her next protest.
‘Of course you can. She’d only try to stop you,’ he replied. ‘But she’ll get used to it. It’s best just to go back and tell her it’s been done.’
‘But we don’t know much about each other, do we? She might think we’re marrying in haste and you know what they say about that. Why should I marry you anyway when you’ve never courted me properly? You only come to see me now and again…’
He turned his head towards her and looked her straight in the eyes.
‘I know enough about you to want to marry you. And it’s not in haste. I’ve thought about you ever since you were that wee lassie in Maryfield stable. Do you remember? I tried putting you out of my mind but you kept getting back in. Believe me, I didn’t want to get married at first.
‘I stayed away because I was trying to fight you off – but you’ve got me, Aylie Cannon, and you’re never going to get rid of me now.’
She remembered every single time she had ever seen him, including the day at the fair when he had that boldeyed girl on his arm.
‘But what about your other girls? What about that one you went to the Lammas Fair with?’
He laughed, his eyes crinkling at the
corners. ‘She worried you, did she? That was me trying to put you off. Oh, she was just a diversion. I want you for a wife.’
They made good progress because, as they travelled eastwards, a thaw came creeping in from the coast. She knew she was going to do it – she’d known that from the moment he asked her – but she was not going to make it easy for him.
Coldstream was growing closer and she could see the little town clinging to the north bank of the river Tweed as they came along the road from Kelso towards it. Using his whip as a pointer, Hugh showed her the wide arched bridge over the river that marked the boundary with England.
‘The place Patie marries people is at the end of the bridge,’ he said.
‘I don’t think I should do it,’ she said. ‘After all, I don’t even know how you earn your living.’
He shot a glance at her. ‘But you must have heard.’
‘My mother says you’re a poacher and that you’re one of the Boomer men.’
‘She’s well informed, your mother, for a woman who lives in a hermit’s cell.’
‘Are you really a smuggler, Hugh?’
‘Would it make a difference if I said I was?’
They were in the main street now, heading for the little inn at the end of the bridge. Then she laughed.
‘No, I don’t suppose it would,’ she told him, shaking her head.
Everywhere Hugh Kennedy went people knew him and greeted him by name. In the inn at the end of the bridge, an old man behind the rough bar shouted out at the sight of him.
‘What’re you after in this weather, Kennedy?’ he asked jovially, pouring dark porter into a pewter mug.
‘I’m after Patie Mudie. I’m getting married today,’ said Hugh, lifting the mug and handing it to Aylie.
The other men in the bar gave a cheer. ‘A wedding! You’ll have to put up the drinks then,’ and one ran out of the inn door, shouting back over his shoulder, ‘I’ll fetch Patie before the lassie changes her mind.’
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