‘What Mrs Williamson doesn’t say is how bondagers themselves feel. She ignores the fact that we’re forced into signing our lives away for a year at a time; we’ve no choice but to live with a strange family. It’s not from choice that we do this, it’s for survival. Anyone who’s worked on a farm knows the hardships of a bondager’s life. We earn our money the hard way for we do a man’s work for half the wages. We have no status, too often we’re treated as animals and in fact many farmers look after their beasts better than they look after their bondages. I know women who’ve delivered their children in barns or under hedges and have had to go back to work next day. I know women who’ve been forced to sleep with their hinds because they would be driven out of their jobs if they didn’t.
‘If it is an immoral system, it’s not the women who make it so. Mrs Williamson, don’t betray us, don’t betray your own sex! Speak for us, we need someone who’ll do that. I agree the bondage system needs abolishing but not for the reasons you put forward. It needs abolishing because it is unfair to women, it’s debasing and uncaring. We need a champion, Mrs Williamson. Remember your own days in the fields and try to sort the wrongs done to your sisters.’
The faces of the platform party were rigid with disapproval as she sat down and a mutter of embarrassment swept the audience. Only one or two brave women dared to clap in agreement and others turned their heads to stare at this woman who had spoken so boldly from the back of the hall. When it became obvious that her interruption was going to be brushed aside as an embarrassment and that nothing was going to be done or said about it, Aylie stood up and left the meeting. But at last she knew what she wanted to do, she wanted to campaign for the abolition of the bondage system. She realized now the surge of energy that Hugh must have felt when he was going around speaking to the labourers about fighting for their rights. Having a cause to fight for was a good reason for living.
* * *
Cholera swept the Borders during 1848 and 1849. It started among the gangs of Irish labourers brought in to dig the new railway lines which were beginning to snake across the countryside bringing with them huge changes, the magnitude of which no one could yet comprehend.
In Melrose the labourers and their families died like flies and the bodies were buried communally in a huge ditch at the edge of the abbey burying ground, unmarked by any stone or list of names of the poor bewildered men, women and children who sickened and died within a few hours.
From the town it spread to the larger villages, an insidious infection against which the terrified people had recourse to old-fashioned charms, but too often those failed. Local newspapers kept tally of the numbers who died – fifty deaths in a week were common in places with populations of little over one thousand.
Cholera was no respecter of sex, age or social position. The rich, if they were unable to leave the district, died beside the poor; whole families succumbed and the workforces of the rising industrial towns were decimated. The only people who were relatively immune from the infection were the agricultural labourers who were not in contact with the sickness and whose open-air life gave them resistance.
The overworked doctors of the district hoped that the onset of winter in 1848 would halt the disease but this proved unfounded. When frost silvered the hedgerows and made the spiders’ webs look like lace between the twigs, people were still dying.
Jane was asked for help by frightened people who had lost faith in conventional medicine and were prepared to try her preparations. She brewed her potions and cast her mother’s ancient spells but even she was often defeated, although some of her cases did survive through her insistence that they be forced to drink honey and water whether they wanted to or not. Their tightly clamped jaws were forced apart and the liquid poured down closing throats. If the treatment was continued long enough, they had a chance of living.
Her exertions during the time of the sickness made her tired, dog tired. And she was disillusioned by her inability to cope with this killing disease which seemed to face up to her like a personal adversary. Her ancient charms could not combat this new menace brought in by the railways and she thought of the huge black engines – with their shining brass trim and funnels pouring smoke into the atmosphere – as forerunners of an unthinkable future. Her secret Borderland was about to be invaded by the outside world and she hated the idea of its violation.
The fairies would all run away; the monks would no longer chant in Charterhall; the magic dream that had engulfed her beloved countryside since time began would be disrupted.
There were many nights when she climbed down into her little cell ready to die herself with tiredness and disillusion. Yet she continued working, walking into Melrose with her medicines every day and walking home again at night. As time passed her step grew less buoyant, her shoulders drooped and her friends and neighbours noticed how much grey had suddenly appeared in her hair.
In late summer, she realized there was something seriously wrong with her, but the cholera seemed to be dying away at last and she refused to give up. Her chest ached and there were bad pains down her left arm as she staggered home to Charterhall.
‘I can’t die here,’ she muttered to herself as she swayed along the river path, ‘I’ve got to get back to the abbey.’
Her head was swimming and her breath coming in rasping breaths by the time she reached her little home. Once inside she collapsed on the floor, surrounded by her carefully guarded treasures. She lay quietly still and closed her tired eyes. It was just like falling asleep…
A woman from the row of cottages on the ridge of the hill overlooking the abbey was concerned that she had not seen Jane for three days and came down to look for her. She found the body lying in the little cell.
‘Your mother was smiling,’ she told Aylie when she broke the news.
Jane had everything in neat order. It only took one brass-bound trunk to hold her treasures – Alice’s old books, the ink faded to a shadow now; some clothes and of course, Blaize’s fine jacket; the silver and the manuscripts; a couple of bits of china, one of them the fairing Hugh and Aylie had given her; a pair of pots in gleaming brass; spare bedding and a patchwork bed cover made by her grandmother. When Aylie closed the door of the cell for the last time she knew that within weeks little dormice and foxes would be rummaging around in it, the whitewashed walls would be stained green with damp and it would soon be forgotten that a woman had lived there, a woman who looked out every morning on to the ruins that she loved so much. The last of the Cannons had left Charterhall.
She was leading Jed and Bobby back to their stables one evening when the steward told her that a gentleman was waiting for her in the yard. Wiping her face with her headcloth, she led the horses into their stalls and went to answer the summons. A dark-suited stranger with a narrow beard running round the edge of his jawbone came forward from the tackroom, extending his hand and, very conscious of her rough clothes and heavy boots, she looked wonderingly at him.
‘I’m the lawyer from Melrose,’ he told her, ‘I’ve come about your mother’s will. I’ve been looking for you for some time, and finally Mr Hepburn was able to tell me where you were working.’
She was surprised. ‘My mother’s will? I didn’t know she had a will.’
‘Oh yes, she came to me some time ago to draw one up. She was a very careful woman. She’s left everything to you, of course. It’s in the Melrose bank. She’s left you three hundred pounds.’
‘Three hundred pounds!’ Aylie was astonished. How had Jane managed to gather so much money together? The solicitor realized the reason for her surprise.
‘She’s been saving for years – she lived very frugally as you know but she had many patients… I even consulted her myself more than once. He gave a little chuckle at this sally.
Aylie turned solemn eyes on him and said nothing till he was forced to reassume his professional manner. ‘The money is deposited in the bank as I have said, and it’s yours. I’ve brought you the will and her bank book so that y
ou can see for yourself.’
In a dream she walked back to the horses in their stable, took up her dandy brush and began rubbing away at Bobby’s coat. Three hundred pounds, what would she do with all that money? For a woman who had never earned more than thirteen pounds a year, it was a fortune.
It was a sudden decision. Yes, of course, she would buy herself a cottage, a roof over her head where she would be safe from eviction, safe from being turned out at the whim of an employer.
She’d have to go on working but she could take jobs in the seasonal gangs hired during the busy times of the farming year. She’d still be a farm labourer but she would no longer be in bondage.
Her new home stood at the edge of Charterhall estate in a little hamlet of low-roofed thatched houses with a panoramic view over the spreading Borderland to the south. On fine days she could see the rounded tops of the Cheviot hills that she had ridden over with Hugh. The cottage had a tiny back garden running down to an outdoor lavatory and a pigsty. It cost her fifty pounds and on the day she signed the document which made it hers, she stood in the garden and felt the joy of possession rise in her heart. The earth beneath her feet, right to the core of the world, she thought, belonged to her. Every stone of the rough cottage wall was hers; every flower and herb in the garden; every branch on the two apple trees; every stick of the massive rhubarb plant growing near the pigsty belonged to Aylie Kennedy.
The farmer she worked for did not want to lose her but she could not continue working so far from her new home and was firm in her resolve to leave at the end of her term. The thought of parting with her beloved Jed and Bobby made her sad but when she remembered her cottage and the new life she had planned, that sorrow was swept away by her new concerns.
* * *
She was well settled by the summer of 1850. From time to time peddlers came to her door, spreading out their packs of bits and pieces on the whitened doorstep. She was not extravagant but sometimes she would buy a broadsheet, a pamphlet or a twist of lace and always she was eager to hear the news of the world from those itinerants who picked up gossip as they travelled from place to place and passed it on, suitably embroidered like the bits of flashy finery they sold. They brought news of revolutions raging far away – in Italy, in France – there were even outbreaks of sedition in England, they said. People were beginning to stand up for themselves at last, she thought, but in spite of the railways, the Borderland stayed somnolent and indifferent. ‘There will never be any revolutions here, what happens outside only causes ripples in our lives,’ said Aylie.
* * *
One bright afternoon when the rowan tree in her garden was heavy with scarlet berries and there was a sharp nip in the air, she was harvesting potatoes when she heard a rattling at her gate. Thinking it was another peddler, she wiped her hands on her apron and went round to the front of the cottage where a gypsy woman wrapped in the usual dark shawl was standing on her front doorstep. Her heart gave a jump of fear when she saw that it was Hugh’s mother, the black-visaged Romany whose high slanting cheekbones showed her origins far more than Hugh or his father, and who looked back at her now with dark, malevolent eyes.
‘They told me you were here. I came to ask if you’ve heard anything about my laddie.’
Aylie silently shook her head. His mother still retained the power to terrify her, such a feeling of evil emanated from the woman.
‘He’s been away over ten years. It’s more than that since they marched him out of Perth jail. Haven’t you heard anything?’ she demanded.
‘No, I had one letter years ago when he first got to Australia – but nothing since.’ She hated admitting this, especially to his mother.
‘I doubt he’s not coming back then,’ said the hag, turning on her heel. ‘My dream must’ve been wrong.’ Aylie stepped forward and tried to stop her. ‘Your dream? What did you dream?’
The woman laughed. ‘Oh, you want to know, do you? It’ll cost you, lady…’ Her voice took on the wheedling note that gypsy women used when they came round the doors selling clothes pegs to the cottagers. Aylie knew that she was being mocked but she had to find out why the woman had come.
‘How much do you want? I’ll pay you.’
‘You can’t give me what I want,’ was the reply. ‘What I want is for you and my Hugh never to have met. You can’t give me that. If my dream comes true you’ll find out soon enough – and maybe you’ll wish you hadn’t.’
She marched off down the lane but before she disappeared, she turned back and shouted to Aylie, ‘I came to tell you something else. My man Gilbert Kennedy died last week. We burned his bothy yesterday.’
Hugh, 1849
‘Hang on, hang on…’ The words rang in Hugh Kennedy’s head as he sat with his back against a sun-warmed wall, a half bottle of rum in his hand. He often listened to the words in his head as if they were a sort of background music to his life, but it was not always easy to understand what they meant. His memory was vague, he could not remember very much of what had happened to him before he arrived in Sydney but he was grateful that his life had been less brutal for a couple of years now. He was a ticket-of-leave man and had found a job on a large stud farm on the outskirts of the sprawling settlement round Sydney Bay. His knowledge of horses and his ability as a rider made him invaluable to the owner, a gentleman from England who had travelled voluntarily to Australia to make a new life in the emergent country. Like many other new settlers he was mad on racing and because he was rich, had been able to establish a magnificent stud like nothing Hugh had ever seen before. There were forty thoroughbred brood mares grazing in fenced paddocks and five proud Arab stallions rearing and kicking in spacious boxes in the stableyard. When he was working with the horses, he was happy and his confusion left him but when he was alone, a terrible feeling of sadness would sometimes sweep over him, a feeling of loss which was only assuaged by drinking rum.
Liquor was used like currency among the convict population and it was easy to come by. It brought oblivion for hours and even the next day, when he awoke, his head hurt too much for him to be able to think of anything else. He knew he should be saving money for a passage home but each time he was on the verge of getting enough, he went on a drinking spree and ended up days later in some harbourside brothel, agonized and repentant. His boss at the stud farm always took him back – drunk or sober, Hugh Kennedy was the best stud groom he had ever employed. The gypsy could turn out a horse in the pink of condition, its coat shining like satin and every nerve in its body ready for peak performance. Horses that were looked after by him swept the boards in local races and silver cups lined up like soldiers on parade on top of the owner’s imported mahogany sideboard in the vast dining room of his new house.
So eager was he to keep Hugh that if he had been sober too long – for there was no secret made of his intention to get back to Scotland – the stud owner would deliberately ply him with rum and off the rails he went again.
His head was pulsing with pain and his mouth was rasping dry one morning when the owner brought a party of ladies and gentlemen to look at his mares and foals. The women were of the sort that were not often seen by Hugh, for they were pretty, crinolined visions with frilled parasols held coquettishly over straw bonnets. Ribbons floated from their hats and their sleeves so that they looked like a collection of china dolls. The convicts in the stableyard gaped at them in open admiration but as far as the women were concerned, they did not exist. Convicts were commonplace sights, like stray dogs, and less highly regarded.
Hugh led out the best mare, an elegant chestnut, who came trotting along the path at the end of the halter rope with her foal at her side. He stroked her muzzle gently and told her to stand still while the party crowded round her making cooing sounds of delight. The foal, tempted by the delicious smell of women’s perfume, stuck its head forward and its mother shivered in apprehension, turning her head to watch what her precious child was doing. Hugh put up a hand and rubbed her ears confidingly.
‘It’
s all right lass,’ he told her. ‘Nobody’ll hurt your bairnie.’
The mare trusted him and calmed herself again while the foal raised its soft lips and nuzzled a piece of sugar from one girl’s hands. Hugh felt the girl’s eyes on him as he stood with the mare resting her head confidingly against him.
‘She seems to like your groom,’ said the pretty girl with a dimpling smile at the proud stud owner.
‘Oh, all the horses like Kennedy. He’s got a way with him. He’s a gypsy, you see,’ he explained to the gathering as if Hugh were deaf.
‘A gypsy!’ The women shivered in apprehension and looked at Hugh with new interest. Now that he had a good job and was being fed regularly, he had regained his stature and his strength. In spite of his drinking, he was an imposing man with his straight back and his silver-streaked hair. The intense animal attraction he had for women as well as horses was still with him.
The pretty girl came forward and asked him, ‘Can I stroke the mare, please?’
‘Put your parasol down then,’ said Hugh gruffly. ‘You’ll scare her if you don’t.’
The girl flushed slightly and lowered the pale pink parasol. When she did so, he could see her more clearly and as he cast his eyes over her, he saw that there was a wreath of white satin roses twined along the brim of her hat. Lovely white satin roses, as full flowered as if they had just been picked from the bush on a hot summer’s day. Their petals were tightly curled one over the other and the white leaves gently cradled the flowers like loving hands. He staggered slightly as a terrible pain hit him like a fist thrust into his gut. Aylie, oh, Aylie! He’d given Aylie a sprig of roses just like those on their wedding day in Coldstream. Now he knew why he had to leave Australia, he had to go back to Aylie!
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