Patie Mudie was a grave-faced man who could have passed for a churchman, so solemn was his demeanour and so dark his clothes. He was immensely tall, with very long arms that made him look like a monkey Aylie had once seen in a cage at the fair. The lugubriousness of his expression as he surveyed the bridal pair reminded her of the monkey’s face as well.
‘It’ll cost you half a guinea,’ were his first words to Hugh, and when the coin was handed over he bit it with his yellow teeth to see if it was counterfeit. ‘You canna be too sure,’ he solemnly informed the bride as he did this.
They were told to stand up together in the middle of the bar-room floor, watched by the smiling drinkers and a few women from the kitchens who came crowding in to see the fun. They made a handsome pair as they held hands and Patie chanted his formula over them, ending with ‘I declare you to be man and wife before God and in the sight of man.’
The crowd cheered but Hugh and Aylie were deaf to the noise. Like people in a dream they dropped hands, stepped close together and for the first time he kissed her – very gently. At the touch of his lips and his breath on her face, she felt the strength leaving her entire body. There was no doubt left in her now. She had done the right thing.
‘Is that it?’ she softly asked when he released her from his arms. Then to Patie she said, ‘Are you sure this marriage is legal?’
Patie was incensed at her doubt. ‘Of course it’s legal. I’ve married hundreds of couples. It’s as legal as any ceremony done by a preacher. I’m a professional man, I’ll have you know.’
He produced a slip of paper which was filled in with their names, dated and handed over for them to sign. Aylie wrote her name and gave Hugh the pen but he looked at it with a red flush rising in his face. ‘I can’t write,’ he said to her.
She took his hand in hers and said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll guide your hand,’ and with her helping him they wrote his name on the marriage lines.
Patie was pleased when everything was done and he had a mug of porter in his hand. ‘There, that’s your proof,’ he told her when he handed the marriage paper to her.
They walked out of the inn like people in a trance and Hugh said, ‘Before we go back, I want to buy you a wedding favour.’
There was a little shop selling cloth and ribbons tucked away in the corner of the high street, and the old woman who came bustling through from the back premises when the bell over her front door rang out was smiling and friendly. She seemed to guess that they were newly wed and was happy for them.
‘I want a wedding favour for my wife,’ said Hugh, reaching into his pocket for some money.
The shop woman looked at Aylie’s radiant face and asked, ‘What sort of favour would you like?’
Hugh had obviously been thinking about this and he answered for Aylie, ‘I want a white flower for her, something made of satin.’
‘I’ve just the thing,’ she said and from a drawer behind the counter she took a curving spray of white satin roses which she held out to Aylie.
‘Oh, they’re lovely, so lovely,’ whispered the girl and took them gently in her mittened hands. The roses looked exotic and out of place against her working clothes but Hugh took them from her and gently pinned them into the brim of her black hat and then stood back, looking at her.
‘You’re the most beautiful woman in the world,’ he said with fierce and infinite feeling. Then throwing some money down on the counter, and without waiting for change, he led Aylie back to the waiting gig.
As they trotted out of Coldstream he said, ‘We’ll go back by Yetholm. I want you to meet my people.’
‘But what about my mother? She’ll be worried if I don’t go home tonight,’ she protested.
‘Oh, the news that you’ve run off with the gypsy will have got to her by now. Don’t worry about that,’ he told her, and turned the gig over a humpbacked bridge heading for the south.
* * *
The cottage of Hannah Fa’ his mother – gypsy women, like many bondager women, kept their maiden names after marriage – was a hovel. She shared it with her mother and the place was like a cowshed, filthy, unfurnished and stinking with the smell of the foul tobacco the two women smoked constantly in dirty clay pipes. When Hugh strode in with Aylie they were sitting side by side before a fire in the middle of the floor. Over it hung a blackened cooking pot that was giving up a steady hiss of steam and smelt as if they were cooking something unmentionable.
Neither of the women looked surprised and stared at the girl with expressionless black eyes which told her that they had heard about her and liked her as little as her mother liked Hugh – even less in fact.
Both women spoke roughly to Hugh in a strange language, Romany she supposed, and though she guessed that they were perfectly able to speak ordinary Scots, they refused to do so in front of her. She never heard either of them say a single word she could understand because when she was there they stuck resolutely to their own incomprehensible tongue.
Hugh was embarrassed by their reaction to his new wife. ‘We’ll have to stay here tonight and then I’ll take you back to your mother tomorrow,’ he said. ‘We’ll sleep on the floor but pay no heed to them, they don’t like strangers.’
At this the oldest woman spat noisily into the fire and the flames crackled spitefully up the chimney to the blackened beams of the roof.
After they ate some of the horrible stew from the blackened pot, Aylie lay in the crook of her new husband’s arm, watching the flickering flames and thinking that they were having a very odd bridal night. The two evil crones had no intention of going to sleep or leaving them in peace and they crouched whispering over the fire till it seemed to her that they were busy casting evil spells against her. Soon, however, sleep overtook her and he held her close till morning came.
* * *
Jane received the news of the wedding with a grim face.
‘I hope you did all the right things; I hope you carried a nosegay of herbs to drive away the devil and had a silver coin in the heel of your shoe,’ she said to her daughter.
‘Oh Mam, that’s all old rubbish, all witchcraft. People don’t do things like that now,’ Aylie protested.
Jane shook her head. ‘Well, they should,’ she said before turning on Hugh, who was silently watching the mother and daughter. She glared at him and said, ‘Will you look after my daughter, young Kennedy? Will you look after her truly?’
His face was as grim as hers when he replied, ‘I love Aylie, I really love her. You can feel safe about that. I’d never do anything to hurt her. She’s in my heart…’ And he put a clenched fist on his chest in an expressive gesture that allayed some of Jane’s fears about his suitability as a husband. She remembered only too well the power of love and could not bring herself to argue against it.
Before he came to take her to Coldstream, he had found them a place to live in one of the abandoned farmhouses that dotted the Bowmont Valley a few miles outside the hidden village of Yetholm, which local people said guarded its isolation because it was inhabited by two kinds of outcasts – gypsies and smugglers.
The valley was a lonely and empty place, peopled only by sheep belonging to a nearby grazier and dotted by a few isolated farmhouses left empty by families who had emigrated to Canada in the early years of the century.
The house Hugh had taken over and repaired was huddled down behind a man-high drystone dyke, a strong protection against the driving wind and snow that swept up the valley in winter time.
When she stepped inside her own front door for the first time, Aylie was surprised at the size of the house. It was like a mansion compared to the cottages in which she had lived her life, for there were two main rooms downstairs and another two rooms above with tiny windows staring out at the hills that closed in around them like the rim of a bowl. Hugh had made the place watertight and built a brick oven beside the open kitchen hearth, so it was a snug hideaway. Outside there was a line of old stone sheds and byres where they would keep a cow, a pig and, of course
, their horses.
His father, old Gilbert, was waiting in the house for them to arrive and he embraced her warmly. ‘My word, I’m glad he had the sense to pick you for a wife,’ he told her. ‘You’re the best woman on a horse I’ve ever seen in my life and I’ve seen a few. I’m going to give you a wedding present, I’m going to tell you the Horseman’s Word!’
He caught hold of her head and whispered in her ear… ‘Belthazar, Melchior, Achitophel… Guard it well, never write it down. Not many people have the word and some would kill to get it.’
She was suitably impressed because the Horseman’s Word was a closely guarded secret. Those who did not have the secret regarded it as a joke but the initiates firmly believed that knowledge of the words gave them power over the most intractable horses. It had to be passed on by someone with the power, and the knowledge was guarded jealously by the gypsies. Fathers told the ‘word’ to their eldest sons – but usually to no one else.
All spring and summer Hugh stayed at home with her, and when they needed money he took occasional jobs on neighbouring farms, helping with the sowing, then with the shearing, the hay making and finally the harvesting. He gave her his wages which she buried beneath the earthen floor of the kitchen in an old stone crock. Living cost them little because they cultivated their garden and augmented their diet with vegetables brought from the farms where Hugh worked and fish or game he poached from the nearby moors and rivers.
They were blissfully happy, like two children in paradise. One of their greatest joys was to go together to every local fair, riding out in the early morning mounted on two good horses, to spend the day among the stalls and sideshows, greeting old friends and making new ones. Marriage had made Aylie blossom into a lovely, proud-looking woman and her happiness showed in her face. Her eyes were full of her dashing, handsome husband and she espoused all his causes with fervour.
He had never been taught to read or write – in fact he had never gone to school at all – but he had needle-sharp intelligence and could absorb information more quickly than anyone she had ever met. In the evenings, they sat together in one big chair by their fireside and she read to him till the candle guttered down in the brass candlestick. Then they went up to bed, to lie close and deep on their down-stuffed pillows, under a thick quilt. Their lovemaking was ecstatic and as the months passed she grew more and more adroit in the art of pleasing them both in bed.
‘You’re a witch like your mother,’ he whispered to her as they lay naked and close together after their fury of passion subsided.
She thought this innocent life would never end but when autumn came, when the rosehips and brambles glowed like jewels in the hedgerows and mists drifted like melancholy ghosts up their valley, he told her about the smuggling trade.
From time to time, they had ridden out together at night to attend meetings where he spoke about the fight for better conditions for farm workers, though never as fervently as he had done in the Myreheugh schoolroom. The audiences, usually small and predominantly male, would nod and agree with what he said but no one was ever moved to the same level of indignation as Hugh.
When he sensed that his audience were backing away from him and were too timid to answer his plea that they form unions and organize themselves against their employers, scorn crept into his words. Aylie, who knew him so well, could see it burning in his dark eyes and hear it echoing bitterly in his voice. He knew he was preaching a lost cause.
One night, as they left a particularly lukewarm gathering, he said to her, ‘I’m giving this up. The people round here are too scared to stand up for themselves. You mark my words, Aylie, when the rest of the country is free, the Borderers’ll still be touching their forelocks to the masters. I’m sticking to smuggling from now on.’
She stared across at him, fear gripping her heart. ‘Smuggling, what do you mean? It’s dangerous, Hugh, you might get caught.’
He laughed. ‘I’ve not been caught yet, lass, and I’ve been smuggling since I was ten years old.’
He never spoke at a meeting again and she grieved because she knew that the enormous energy and rage which possessed him had to be channelled into something else, and she worried about where it would take them.
In early November he came into their kitchen one evening accompanied by a large, ferocious-looking white dog. It had tiny, piglike eyes set in a wedge-shaped skull and its head moved from side to side as if it were trying to size up everything and everyone in the room.
‘My God, Hugh, what’s that?’ she gasped, recoiling from the slobbering beast. She liked dogs but this one struck her as being particularly ugly and dangerous.
He laughed. ‘Don’t be scared, it looks worse than it is. It’s a bull terrier, doesn’t it look fierce?’
‘What do we want a dog like that for? We’ve got two collies already and one of them’s due to have pups any day now. We’ve plenty of dogs.’
‘Oh, I’ve got a use for Nelson, haven’t I, old man?’ he said and bent to fondle the animal’s ears with a grin on his face. She could tell that he already knew what the use was.
‘What are you going to do?’ she demanded, hands on her hips, and he laughed again.
‘Nelson and I are going smuggling.’
All during the following week there was a great deal of coming and going at their isolated home. Hugh brought in four new horses and he trotted them out, putting them through their paces for the men who drifted into the yard as the evenings closed in. For a short time she hoped he was only trying to sell the horses but that was not the case, he was showing them off.
One of the most frequent visitors was a half gypsy called Charlie Eckford who was a blacksmith in a tiny hamlet between their house and Yetholm. He was as fiery and wild as her husband and almost as impressive to look at, for he was massively built – burly as an ox, with muscles like knotted ropes in his arms.
Like Hugh, Charlie was a radical who violently preached the cause of workers’ revolution. He was an educated man who greedily soaked up information from any newspapers he could lay his hands on and he passed it all on to Hugh. They agreed in their disillusionment about the attitudes of his more accepting contemporaries.
‘The fools, they should be organizing themselves, not bending their heads and taking what’s handed out to them. They should want more, they should demand more. For God’s sake, we’re as good as any man, aren’t we Hughie? Good as any man!’
‘And better, much better than most!’ Hugh always replied to this plea from Charlie.
She knew they were planning some nefarious expedition and it was no surprise when he told her, ‘Aylie, I’m going away for a couple of days down over the Border. Will you be all right here or do you want to go and stay with your mother?’
She looked round from the fireplace where she was raising bread on the top of the oven and said without hesitation, ‘I’ll stay here, Hugh. If anyone saw me at Charterhall, they’d wonder why. You know how tongues can wag. No, I’ll be all right. Nobody ever comes up here and if they do I’ll pretend you’re out on the hills.’
He was delighted at the way she was taking it, and gave her a kiss.
But she struggled out of his grasp and said, ‘You’d better tell me exactly what you’re doing. What are you smuggling anyway?’
‘Charlie and I have decided that we ought to get into the trade in a bigger way… we’ve been at it off and on for years but in a small way, and always for other people. We just carried the stuff over the Border. But now we’re going to make money for ourselves, we’re going to take whisky down to Boulmer. There’s a Frenchman called Daniel Fleury who comes over from France with brandy and tobacco and he’ll take all the whisky we can carry down to him. If we can’t change our lives one way, we can change them another! We’ll get rich, Aylie, you’ll have a silk gown yet.’
She sat down at the kitchen table and said, ‘So that’s why you’ve been getting new horses?’
Hugh nodded. ‘And that’s why I got Nelson. He’ll run with us as
protection against nosy excise men.’
She looked at the slobbering dog. ‘But he’s so gentle, what could he do?’
Hugh laughed. ‘Nothing, I suppose, but he looks damned wicked, you’ve got to admit that. All the big gangs have dogs running with them.’
Aylie was disturbed. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing. What if you get caught?’
He stood up and went over to the fire, where he leant an arm along the mantelpiece, staring back at her defiantly.
‘I won’t get caught. I’ll make sure of that. I know these moors like the back of my hand. My grandfather, old Matt, used to take me out with him when he did a bit of smuggling so I know old gypsy routes across the hills that no one else knows. We’ll take our stuff to Boulmer and bring more back. No one will be any the wiser.’
The magnitude of the undertaking suddenly appalled her. It was not a jape any longer.
‘I’m afraid for you,’ she said simply and he came across to put his arms round her waist, nuzzling at her hair.
‘Don’t be afraid, my dearest heart. I’m doing it to give us a better life, you and me. We’ll have money in our pockets and a gig for you to drive in. You won’t ever have to slave in the fields again or go in fear of a farmer. I’ve told you, if we can’t win pride and independence one way, we’ll win it another.’
* * *
The two men in Aylie’s kitchen were laughing and joking as if they were going to a fair and not on a nefarious trip, fraught with danger.
For the past two weeks Hugh had been filling the hayloft with ankers of whisky bought from some of the many illicit stills that were scattered over the lonely hills. Now he and Charlie were bringing them down and rolling them over the yard so that they could be tied to the sides of their four packhorses. Each man was to ride one horse and lead two others, an undertaking that required expert horsemanship.
Lark Returning Page 19
