May shook her head in shared sympathy for Hannah as well as for Aylie. ‘Oh, it’s not good if a lassie’s clever. If she’d been a boy she could have gone to college and been a minister or something like that – but not if she’s a lassie.’
‘It’s unfair, isn’t it?’ asked Aylie. ‘It’s just another of the things that are unfair for women in this world.’
‘But what’s she going to do? Will she go on the land like you did?’
Aylie shook her head. ‘I suggested that but she was furious, she says women who work on the land are nothing better than animals… She’s very proud, like her father was.’
May clicked her tongue. ‘Pride’s all right but you’ve got to live, haven’t you? If you hadn’t worked on the land all those years, where would she be now?’
Aylie nodded. ‘I know, but you can’t tell a headstrong girl that. I sympathize with her in a way. I know what it’s like to look at rich women and compare the way they lead their lives and how you lead yours… Don’t you ever wonder about that, May?’
But May was not strong on imagination and she shook her head before saying proudly, ‘My youngest lassie’s going into service in the big house near us. She’s starting as a kitchenmaid but the family go to London every year and they might take her with them. They’re aye looking for girls because the housekeeper’s such a tyrant. Would Hannah like me to speak for her there?’
‘I don’t want her to go too far away at first. Perhaps she’ll take a job round about here for a while,’ said Aylie. ‘But if she doesn’t like it, I’ll ask for your help, May. It’s kind of you to offer.’
Before the shepherd’s wife left the cottage, Hannah came sweeping in. There was a great change in the girl since the last time May had seen her and she was surprised at the feeling of energy that came off Hannah, the sense of movement, of drive – and she had to admit it, of defiance and rebellion. Hannah was very tall and erect in her bearing, she walked like a duchess although her clothes were shabby. She was also as haughty as a duchess and scarcely spoke to her mother or the visitor, flashing her dark eyes and furrowing her brows as she passed them. May instinctively drew back from her as she always did from the predatory gypsy women who accosted her in the lane near her home, begging for money or food.
When she met her husband that evening, she was looking solemn.
‘Poor Aylie’s got her hands full with that lassie, she’s a right Romany,’ she told him.
* * *
The winter of 1874-75 was bitter. Snow and cold winds came sweeping down from the north; farm workers and animals huddled together in the sheds; birds fluffed out their feathers and crouched down in the lowest branches of the hedges; the earth took on the look of cold steel and the unrelenting frost stiffened tufts of moss on the tops of walls and froze the water of the animals’ drinking troughs so hard that even steel-tipped crooks could not break through the ice.
During the hardest grip of the frost, old Jock Hepburn died and his grandson walked across the fields to take the news to Aylie. ‘He was eighty-two and he just fell asleep,’ said the boy.
* * *
‘I can’t stand it…’ Every time Hannah came back from yet another job, Aylie knew what she would say: ‘I can’t stand the people, I can’t stand the noise, I can’t stand the way they treated me.’
When she came back for the third time, Hannah’s mother was grim-faced as she listened to the reasons for unemployment again.
‘I can’t stand being ordered about. And what was worse, I can’t stand the way the master and mistress treated me. They looked right through me as if I wasn’t there.’
‘People don’t usually pass the time of day with their kitchenmaids,’ said Aylie wearily.
‘But they’re such fools,’ spat Hannah, her eyes flashing. ‘All they ever think about is hunting and horses!’
Aylie’s face softened as she recalled her own youth when horses totally filled her mind. ‘That doesn’t mean they’re fools,’ she ventured, but Hannah would have none of it.
‘I couldn’t stand them, Mother. I couldn’t stand having to step back against the passage wall and look down at my boots every time one of the household passed me.’
Aylie was cleaning her own working boots as she listened and she reflected that labouring women had done far more demeaning things than drop their eyes for an employer. ‘The trouble with you, Hannah, is that there’s not a job in the world that’s going to suit you. When you went to the weaving mill in Galashiels, you couldn’t stand the noise and the other girls.
‘When I got you a job on the farm, you didn’t last a month. Now you’ve left the job that May got you – and it had prospects. If the housekeeper liked you she’d have taken you to London like she did with May’s girl.’
Hannah flushed angrily at her mother’s criticism.
‘You agreed with me about the mill. You said yourself it would be like Hell to be shut up all day. You understood why I left the farm, there just wasn’t anybody there to talk to. They’re like animals, those people.’
Aylie nodded, her face bitter. ‘I know, you said we were “red-faced rustics”, if I remember rightly.’
‘Not you, Ma, of course not you, but those others. Even your precious Hepburns are nothing more than rustics. None of them has ever even been to Edinburgh far less over the Border into England.’
Aylie, who thought the Hepburns were the finest family in the world, rose to their defence. ‘If only you could settle down with somebody like one of the Hepburns, I’d be a happy woman. But not you…’
‘No, not me.’ Hannah was really angry now. ‘Not me. I’ll not settle down as you call it with anybody. Look what happened to you when you “settled down”. Is that the life you want for me? It’s not the life I want for myself. I’ve made up my mind, Mother. I want to go to London, and if I do it won’t be because some housekeeper takes me to scrub away in a basement kitchen. No, I’ll go on my own and make my own way.’
Memories of Rosie came back to Aylie. What had happened to her friend, she wondered? No one had heard from Rosie since she left, not even her mother.
‘What do you think you’ll do in London?’ she asked her daughter.
‘What does it matter? I’ll survive. There’s plenty of things I could do. I’m going, Mother, you can be sure of that.’
A week later she went out early in the morning and when she returned at midnight, she was looking happier than she had done for some time.
Aylie asked, ‘Where have you been till so late?’ Hannah said airily, ‘I went over to Yetholm to see the Kennedys. My father’s mother’s still alive and she likes me. She says I look like she did when she was a young woman.’
‘That’s true, she did look like you, I always thought you took after her,’ agreed Aylie carefully.
‘She’s given me the money for the fare to London, she thinks it’s a good idea for me to go there,’ said Hannah triumphantly, unable to keep this bit of news to herself any longer.
‘So that’s her last bit of revenge against me,’ said Aylie bitterly.
* * *
The parting on Melrose station was not as affecting as the parting from Adam had been. As she waved from the train window Hannah looked raffish, in much the same way as Hugh used to do when he dressed as a gentleman. What would her girl do in London, Aylie wondered. How would a young woman of twenty, who had never lived anywhere else except in the backwater of the Borders, cope with the wicked city? Then she remembered Hannah’s gift of invective and her powerful rages – Hannah, she decided, would cope very well.
As Hannah waved her hand at the dwindling figure of her mother, tears of pity pricked her eyes.
Her mother did not understand her, Hannah was sure of that. She had never understood her. How could Aylie be content to live the life she did, trudging out into the fields early in the morning wearing those heavy working boots and that servile costume? When she had tackled her mother about it, Aylie would run her work-chapped hands down over the heavy
apron and say, ‘But we’ve always dressed like this, we bondager women.’
‘Bondagers! What a name! You don’t have to sign a bond with a hind any more, so why do you keep the name and why do you keep that stupid hat?’
Aylie bristled. The bondager costume was the thing she liked best about her working life. She was proud to go out in the morning, smart as paint. Before nightfall she might end up grimed and dirty, but in the morning she must look smart. It was a matter of pride with her.
She tried to explain this to Hannah but her daughter spat back at her like a cat. ‘You’ve told me how you used to stand up and speak against the bondage and now you’re just a lackey like the rest. You make me laugh, Mother, you really do.’
Standing on the station platform, watching her daughter disappear into the distance in the winding train, Aylie remembered their quarrels… ‘A lackey like the rest!’ She supposed she was, but there had been little alternative for her. At least she had her own house and her little nest egg in the bank so she need not be afraid of ending her days in the poor’s house like so many of her friends and associates. Far away in Canada Adam had not forgotten her and sent small sums of money in his letters. She saved carefully so that she’d be able to die in her own house, among her own things, not depending on grudging handouts from charity or the parish.
Hannah was cut in half by her triumph at getting away at last and regret for what had never been said between her and her mother. She loved Aylie but her mother represented a way of life and expectations which her daughter had been educated to challenge. Hannah knew she was as good as anyone else; she knew she was cleverer than most; her gift of comprehension and analysis, however, had proved to be a barb in her side for it made it impossible for her to accept the way of life led by her forebears.
She would never martyr herself for a man or for a place as Aylie and Jane Cannon had done. She, Hannah Kennedy, longed to change her circumstances, to mix with people who could give her the excitement that was impossible to find at Charterhall. She wanted to be accepted for what she had to offer and not as a representative of a class or a family as she would always be if she stayed at home. Even though part of her was weeping at leaving her mother and the place where she had been born, she had to get away.
She sat with her face pressed against the window, taking in every detail of the soft hills, the clustering woods and the silver rivers. She looked out at neat farmsteads with grey stone buildings and the flocks of sheep and herds of brown and white cows grazing in lush meadows. Her eyes were dazzled by the pale wash of the sky with its drifting trails of cotton clouds.
‘There’s always so much sky in the Borderland,’ she said to herself as her lids drooped in sleep. When she woke she was in another world – a flat, grey world that looked as if it had been dusted over with dirt. Factories and workshops clustered up against the railway line and outside the factory gates she saw lines of sordid little brick-built dwellings, not unlike the pigsty in her mother’s cottage garden.
Women with their arms crossed over their bosoms stood staring at the passing train while small children played in the dirt at their feet. Everybody she saw looked white-faced, thin and hungry, a bitter contrast with the healthy people who worked the land she had left.
She would never have admitted it but London terrified her when she stepped off the train. The bustling people, all of them intent on their own business, all of them looking perfectly at home and able to cope with the din and the jostling, swept past the girl tightly grasping her carpet bag. Her gypsy grandmother had given her the address of some relatives who lived in Stepney in the East End, but she had no idea how to get there and after wandering around the station for some time, she stopped a man in porter’s uniform to ask for directions.
‘I don’t know! The best thing you can do is take a hansom,’ was his reply, and Hannah was forced to draw on her meagre finances for the fare. Turning up in the narrow, smelly East End street in a hansom however gave her a status among her family and their neighbours which she was to retain for ever. They thought she was a very grand lady indeed in her big hat with the flower in it, her tightly fitting dress and her hansom… If they wanted to go anywhere in London, they walked.
Hannah’s Kennedy relatives lived in a couple of filthy rooms that they shared with an army of rats. When she arrived, they crowded round her, exclaiming at her clothes and fingering her possessions with evident avarice. The ragged children, whose faces showed an artfulness that more than equalled their parents’, rummaged into her carpet bag and before she fully realized what was happening anything she had of value simply disappeared. It was obvious that links of blood did not prevent the gypsies regarding any newcomer among them as fair pickings. The women earned their money by begging, thieving or prostitution; the men by occasional work in the docks, pimping or robbery.
‘You’re a real lady, you are,’ said one of the younger women in the curiously wheedling tone that so many Kennedys could turn on at will. ‘Why don’t you get yourself up West and make a copper or two?’
Hannah was so innocent that she felt complimented, smiled and said, ‘Perhaps I will. I’ll have to earn money somehow. Is there good work to be had up West?’
The hags screeched in laughter. ‘Plenty of good money for them that can take it!’
When Hannah realized that the work they had in mind for her was either prostitution or picking pockets, she almost wished that she had stayed at home in her safe Borderland.
Now that she was in London, the object of her dreams for so long, she saw that her travels had taken her from one world to another that she could never have imagined, and the contrast was so marked that for several days she felt lost and disoriented.
She had been used all her life to being wakened in Aylie’s cottage by the sound of birds singing in the pear tree beneath her window. In London she woke to the eternal rattle of traffic mingled with the sounds of fighting women and wailing babies inside the cramped room.
The nights at home had been vast velvet black bowls of silence. Now and again an owl would screech or a badger rustle in the grass of the lane but that was all she ever heard. The nights in London however were even noisier than the days. If people were not fighting or making love in the Kennedys’ rooms, others were doing these things next door or in the slime-streaked alley outside the broken window beneath which she slept on a bed made by her own cloak and empty carpet bag.
Standing in a London street, Hannah realized fully for the first time the immense and mysterious power that her mother’s beloved Eildons had cast on her young life.
They were always there, brooding on the landscape like guardian angels, gathering the people into their skirts and watching over them. Now she had no blessed view to contemplate and wherever she looked there were hostile people, intent on their own business, and squalid houses, leaning higgledy-piggledy against each other, broken walled and broken windowed. The alley beneath her feet was not a daisy-fringed lane but a chaos of broken cobbles running with green slime, and the air did not smell of new-cut hay but revoltingly of sewage.
In spite of her dislike of having to admit to a mistake, she knew she hated the people among whom she now found herself. They had no sense of kinship or loyalty, no finer feelings at all as far as she could see. They smiled at you while they robbed you; they would stab you in your sleep if there was any advantage to it. The children persecuted unwanted kittens and puppies that crawled around scavenging for dropped food and the adults persecuted each other. They were idle, untruthful, scheming and untrustworthy and she quickly learned two things – one was to sleep with a half brick at her hand in case one of the drunken men tried to molest her and the other was never to believe one word any of her relations said.
Their original affability soon wore thin when Hannah refused to turn out at night with her cousins, the streetwalkers who hung around Covent Garden enticing drunken clients and more often picking their pockets than giving them the favours that they expected.
‘You think you’re too grand to make a copper, do you?’ asked one toothless crone whose exact relationship to everyone else – and to Hannah – was unclear.
The girl shook her head. ‘It’s not that, it’s just… I don’t want to be a prostitute.’
The crone mocked her. ‘A prostitute, that’s a fancy police court word. We don’t call them that – we call them slags. But they make enough money to pay for their food and keep. That’s more than you do.’
Hannah had learned to keep what money had escaped the itchy fingers of her family by stitching it into her underclothing and now she reached into her bodice and took out a coin, flinging it angrily at the old woman and saying: ‘There’s my keep for this week! You’ve all had plenty off me. You’ve taken nearly everything I had.’
Yet, in spite of her disillusion, she did not want to go home. It was not just pride that kept her in London. It was the energy, the variety, the eternal fascination of the pulsing, thriving, jostling city.
She walked through the East End marvelling at the squalor of the houses and the engraved-glass, polished-brass grandeur of the pubs where people went to lose themselves in a world of make believe. Even in the morning drunken women sat on the walls around gin palaces, breastfeeding their babies and begging from passers-by with one hand outstretched. Somehow, even in the most squalid streets there always seemed to be music playing – perhaps an organ grinder with his sad-faced monkey, a pub piano or a street singer belting out some music-hall favourite. It was impossible for young Hannah Kennedy’s blood not to run faster at the feeling of excitement and danger the city gave her.
She walked all day, every day, ending up in the West End and gazing in amazement at the fashionable crowd riding along in their carriages, thronging the pavements and clustering around the well-stocked windows of luxury shops. She felt as if she had wandered into fairy land. Melrose was the biggest town she had ever been in apart from the sad visits with her mother to Edinburgh’s madhouse to see her father, and then they never went into the centre of the city because Aylie said she hated it.
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