She knew what questions to ask: ‘Have you a wife? How many children are there in your household? Do you guarantee to give me the same food as you eat yourself?’
All those questions had to be asked, for men without wives were more likely to want to sleep with the bondager; to go into a house with a very large family meant that the bondager had to share a bed with children and that there was never any peace. Some men fed bondages on the same sort of scraps as they threw to their pigs…
Eventually she agreed to take the arles of a hind called Fergusson who had a place on a farm not far from Charterhall. He was married and had two small children, and his wife, a timid-looking woman, was with him when he made the bargain with Aylie.
* * *
The best way to survive was not to think too much. If she allowed her mind to dwell on memories, she screamed inside in silent agony. Sometimes her guard slipped and she would recall loving words he had spoken to her; she would remember the feel of his strong-muscled back beneath her hands as they made love or the splash of cold water over her thighs as they frolicked in the shallows of the Bowmont Water like two brown trout that summer long ago. Then she pushed those memories away, for they hurt too much. It was better to concentrate on the work in hand. On wet days, as she bent over her hoe singling out the turnip seedlings, a chill of despair engulfed her heart, but when the sun shone and warmed her back through the cotton blouse, hope would rise again.
Aylie worked hard; she gave a good day’s work for her wages and it was galling to realize that she earned far less for working harder than her boss, the hind Fergusson. He proved to be a mean-minded man who sullenly envied and resented his employers, who chafed bitterly but in a two-faced way at the caste system of the farming communities. He felt himself to be superior to the people around him and admired Aylie because she read books and any newspapers she could get her hands on. He talked to her because she had opinions about matters outside the incestuous gossip that occupied the minds of most cottagers.
But his admiration alienated his wife against their bondager. Because he was continually holding her up as a superior woman, the atmosphere in the little cottage where they lived grew tense with antagonism. Mrs Fergusson refused to look Aylie in the eye; replied to her attempts at conversation with sullen grunts; and made snide comments about her clothes and her books behind her back.
‘Mrs High-and-Mighty’s always got her nose in a book,’ Aylie overheard her telling the woman next door one day. ‘You wouldn’t think her man was a convict out in Australia, the way she goes on. She thinks she’s a lady does that one, not a gypsy’s doxy.’
It pleased Mrs Fergusson that Aylie never received any letters from Hugh. Because she knew he could not write, she did not expect them but was hurt when the hind’s wife sneeringly asked, ‘How is it you never get any news from that man of yours? How do you know he’s not taken up with another woman away out there in Australia?’
When he was sent to Woolwich, she had wanted to go there too to say goodbye to him, for relatives of prisoners were allowed on the hulks to take farewell of their loved ones – the authorities knew that most convicts never saw their families again.
Gilbert warned her against going however. He told her, ‘He doesn’t want you to see him down there. We’ve had a message from him through one of our folk. He wants money because prisoners can buy extra comforts if they’ve money but he asked to tell you not to try to go down – hulks are hell holes.’
She gave Gilbert all the money she had saved and asked, ‘Who’s going to take it to him?’
‘Abel’s going down with it. We can trust Abel,’ said Gilbert.
‘Then ask him to tell Hugh that I’ll be waiting,’ she said.
* * *
There was something soothing about the way every farming year followed the same course – the spring ploughing and the sowing of the seed; the weeding and singling of the young plants; the shearing and the hay making; the harvest with its glorious sense of completion and then the bitter days of winter when the animals were brought into warm, dark sheds and fed with hay or chopped turnips.
Aylie loved the spring because it brought with it a wonderful feeling of rebirth and as she saw the snowdrops opening in the grass beneath the trees around her mother’s hidden little home, she knew that there was one less year to be lived through until she saw Hugh again. The white flowers with their fragile heads bending so elegantly over the spearlike leaves symbolized hope for her and she gathered them in huge bunches, sinking her face among the delicate flowers and inhaling their soft scent in delight. It was a smell that she remembered from childhood and it always made her feel happy and confident that the coming year would bring, if not complete happiness, at least some sort of consolation.
* * *
After a year of living with the Fergussons, Aylie could stand the tension in their house no longer and told the hind that when her term of bondage ended, she would be seeking a new position. So once again it was back to the hiring fair and once again she had no trouble in finding offers, for she had earned a reputation as a good worker. This time she was hired for a farm about eight miles away from her mother, but as Jane had been well in the past two years and her rheumaticky hands were not so stiff, it seemed safe to leave her. The new farm where Aylie found herself was a larger establishment with a staff of over thirty workers and in the stables a dozen pair of horses. The farmer recognized her on the first morning she turned out in his gang of bondagers.
‘You’re the lassie that used to be with Scroggie, aren’t you?’ he asked. ‘You’re the one that’s such a great hand with horses.’
She nodded and he said, ‘I need an extra hand with the horses. Do you think you could do the job?’
‘I’m sure I could,’ she said.
‘Then I’ll give you Jed and Bobby,’ he replied.
* * *
Early morning in November with the sun just breaking through and a white mist hanging like bridal lace over leafless hedges where spiders’ webs glittered, strings of pearls for fairy people. Proudly pacing, two by two, a cavalcade of magnificent working horses came swinging out of the cobbled yard and headed for the fields, each giant gleaming with careful grooming and hung around with tinkling harness. The brass trimmings of their high collars and on the sides of their bridles flashed fire in the rays of the watery winter sun. Though she saw this parade every morning, Aylie always caught her breath in wonder and admiration for even on the bitterest days, when driving rain made ploughmien bend before the onslaught, the horses stepped out like monarchs, heads held high.
She was proud of her place at Whitethorn Farm because she was the only woman among the people allowed to drive and look after the horses and now, in the second year she’d been there, she was allowed to plough.
This meant that she rose from her bed at five o’clock each morning and, fighting sleep from her eyes, hurried to the stables before she had as much as a crust of bread in her stomach. The horses came first every time. As she opened the stable door, her nostrils were filled with the warm smell of horses; the smell of sweet hay, of horse embrocation, bran, straw, sweat and horse droppings – as heady to her as French perfume was to other women born in easier circumstances.
Her special charges, Jed and Bobby, were two magnificent bay geldings, each standing more than seventeen hands high so they dwarfed her as Gulliver dwarfed the Lilliputians. She knew that with one swing of their bodies they could pin her to the wall and crush her bones, but she trusted them and they trusted her in return, sensing her love and understanding of them.
Each morning, when she arrived to feed them, they whickered softly in greeting and then stood patiently while she pressed her face lovingly against their bellies and, turning their heads, they breathed softly on her as she went over them with a stiff-bristled dandy brush, standing on tiptoe to sweep her arm down their backs and legs before combing out and braiding their long tails so that they would not get entangled in the plough.
It took an h
our to feed and groom the horses to her satisfaction, for the ploughmen all vied with each other for the honour of having the best-turned-out pair. She plaited their manes as well as their tails and tied them up in stiff bows, polished their gleaming skins with a silk handkerchief and then dressed them up in the complicated harness which she had spent the previous evening cleaning. Made of black leather and brass, it was heavy to carry, but she heaved the pieces over the horses’ heads, buckling them down till Jed and Bobby, fully caparisoned, looked as grand as the war horses that carried the knights of old into battle.
Every pair of horses had to be in the field by six o’clock and Aylie was never late. In the beginning she found it hard to hold the widespread handles of her plough, to guide it carefully so that the furrows ran straight and true, but she was lucky in having been given well trained horses who knew far more about ploughing than she did. With their heads down they patiently paced up and down the field, turning with exactitude where it was necessary and if the furrows were straight, it was due to them and not to her.
Being a ploughwoman meant that she worked the same hours as her charges, and farmers were always far more careful about the welfare of their horses than they were about people. Starting work at six, the horses were allowed a half hour’s rest at breakfast time, nine o’clock. Then they went back to work till eleven o’clock when a rest was taken till almost two in the afternoon. They rarely worked past five-thirty except during the harvest.
If she was quick about feeding and settling them for the evening, Jed and Bobby could be happily chomping at filled haynets by half past six and the rest of the night was her own. Sometimes she went home to see Jane, but more often she stayed in the farm toun because there were another fifteen bondagers on the place and among them she had found friends.
For the first time since she had worked with Phemie she had the pleasure of female companions of her own age. Rosie and May, two other bondagers, teamed up with her and once or twice persuaded her to go with them to the Saturday night dances. Aylie loved dancing and when she heard the music playing, her feet started tapping of their own accord. But after a happy night twirling gaily with red-faced partners who threw her about like a bale of hay, she felt terrible guilt that she had momentarily forgotten her grief at being parted from Hugh.
She spoke about this to Rosie, who snorted.
‘Don’t be daft, he wouldn’t expect you to stay in like a nun all the time, would he? What’s wrong with having a dance? How do you know what he’s doing? If I know anything about men he won’t be without a woman and I don’t care how faithful you think he is… it’s just nature.’
‘It’s just nature…’ The words stung her for she knew that as far as Hugh was concerned, they were probably true. His vitality attracted women and there was no point denying it. She started brooding over the possibility of him finding a woman who would replace her in his affections and the thought of it nearly drove her mad. She had never before realized the terrible power of jealousy.
While she was living and working with Fergusson, Aylie had once again become involved in the political ferment that was subterraneously pulsing through the community. In little halls and schoolrooms all over the countryside there were frequent meetings, not rebellious any longer, for people no longer preached sedition or rick burning as they had once done. The meetings now were reasonable (perhaps too reasonable, she secretly thought) attended by people who were anxious to persuade farmers to provide a better way of life for their workers.
Many of the speakers at those meetings were clergymen or farm stewards, men with a foot in both camps, who were anxious not to alienate the powers that prevailed. Agriculture, after having been in a parlous state during the 1830s, was gradually becoming more profitable again and at the same time, workers were drifting off the land, lured away by jobs in the new weaving mills or enticed down south by the railways which had begun to spread their tentacles over the rural countryside. Places which had been isolated since time began found that the building of a railway line joined them up to the outside world. It was the biggest revolution that had ever hit the countryside and it was hard to keep ambitious young men at home when they saw that a train ticket was a passport to another way of life.
They left the land to become soldiers or policemen, or simply to go to the cities to seek their fortunes – which many of them succeeded in doing for they were bred not to be afraid of hard work.
The women left behind on the land found that their labour was more highly regarded than before. It was now not uncommon for a farmer to say that he would rather hire a bondager than a hind, for women worked harder and were more likely to stay in a job. Yet the old system still prevailed; women were not hired in their own right, they had to make their contracts with hinds before they could be hired as a back-up work force. This irked many of them, who knew that they were capable of doing a better job than the hinds who literally owned them during their year of bondage.
* * *
Rosie was having trouble with the man to whom she was bonded. He came creeping into her bed at night and when she spoke of it to May and Aylie, May was surprised at her scruples.
‘Why don’t you let him have his way? It’s nothing to you and it’d make your life much easier. Most of the bondager lassies give in – it’s easier that way.’
Aylie was surprised at this attitude. ‘Do you?’ she asked May who laughed, slightly shamefaced.
She said, ‘Well, maybe not in this job but I have in the past. If they pester me, I do. The wives are sometimes glad to get them out of their beds and into the bondager’s, so they don’t make any trouble. It means a year without a bairn for them, at least.’
‘But what if you have a child? What then?’
Rosie flushed slightly and said defensively, ‘My mother was a bondager and she had me in the field. I don’t know who my father was.’
May agreed. ‘Last year I had a bairn the same way and I gave it to my sister to bring up. I go to see my bairn on Sundays, lots of lassies have bairns like that. There’s no shame in it.’
Aylie was anxious to reassure her friends. ‘Of course not, I’m a bondager’s bairn myself. My mother wasn’t married to my father. I’m not accusing you, I just think it’s hard not to have any choice…’
May interrupted angrily, ‘Do any women have choice? My mother had no choice with my father. He just took what he wanted when he wanted it until she died having my sister, her fourteenth bairn. At least if you’re a bondager you can get a new place after a year and when you’re sleeping with your hind, you’ve a hold over him. You can threaten to tell his wife or keep him out of your bed till he makes the work easier for you. You’re well looked after too in case you up and leave. Oh aye, I’d rather be a bondager than a hind’s wife any day.’
Hugh, 1839
Lying in the dark and stinking hold of the convict ship, so unsuitably called the Eden, Hugh put one arm over his eyes and concentrated his mind on Aylie. He remembered her hair, so tightly curled and so soft on his fingers; her satin skin; her elegant body and chalice-like waist. The image of her was held in his mind like a holy icon.
Around him in the ship there were nearly three hundred convicts and of these eighty were women – but not women like Aylie, for the convict floozies were tousle-haired and filthy, their bodies scantily wrapped in rags which they discarded one by one as the ship neared the equator. He could look with such dispassion on their naked breasts and wanton eyes that it seemed he had been emasculated by a combination of imprisonment, brutality and his longing for Aylie.
Until the Eden reached blue water the convicts stayed shackled together, two by two, and took their exercise walking the decks for the hours of daylight, shuffling along like unwillingly joined Siamese twins. There was no attempt to match up compatible spirits – homosexuals were chained to men who loathed what they stood for; those who longed for stimulating conversation were paired with men little more than congenital idiots. Violence had not been absent from Perth prison
but when he reached Woolwich, he looked back on the first part of his imprisonment as a period of refinement. The hulks, moored in the estuary of the Thames, were nothing more than rotting pest houses, tenements of filth and depravity into which men and women were poured while waiting for transportation.
Lesbianism, homosexual rape, beatings up and murder were commonplace among the convicts, over whom towered the authorities, looking on impassively and only intervening when their orders were broken or ignored. Then they resorted to floggings, so brutal and horrible that even men hardened to terrible sights turned their heads away from the lacerated, bleeding backs of those under the lash.
As he lay silent in the darkness, listening to the steady slap, slap of water against the ship’s sides, Hugh felt his neighbour turning towards him.
‘Are you awake, lad?’ came the whisper and he grunted an assent.
‘What are you thinking about?’ It was always the same question in the middle of the night.
‘I’m thinking about my Aylie and wondering what she’s doing tonight, how she’s managing.’
‘I know what my old lady’ll be doing. She’ll be getting up to feed the kids and the hens – at least I hope that’s what she’s doing.’ The speaker had a thick West Country accent which Hugh had taken some time to understand but he knew there had been a similar difficulty with his own accent for John Parr.
He had been fortunate to find himself united with a compatible man like Parr, who was a countryman with an understanding of animals and who liked a bit of poaching. Chained together, they often lay at night talking about tickling trout in sunlit rivers or stalking the gentry’s deer and pheasants in midnight woods. They had been together for six weeks and it had not struck Hugh till now to ask Parr what he had done to earn a sentence of transportation.
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