The Blacksmith's Wife

by Anne Doughty

  She’d come to enjoy the way he smiled at her when she told him about a newly arrived letter, one of a sequence whose predecessors she’d read in the out-letter book. ‘Well you know what to say to him,’ he’d say, washing his hands entirely of the matter.

  He was seldom irritable with her and often asked her advice as a ‘disinterested bystander’. Sarah was seldom disinterested in any matter touching the management of his estates, his responsibility for tenants or servants, but she knew what he meant. He needed to try out his ideas and she enjoyed their discussions, just as she had enjoyed talking to Jonathan Hancock.

  Christmas came and with it the annual supper for staff. Sir George lent her to Mrs Carey so that together they could organise both the family gathering and the purchasing of suitable gifts for all the staff. She’d already found Bridget Carey to be a sensible and practical woman, now she found that she was indeed rather lonely and came to enjoy her company even more. She was sharper and more demanding than Mary-Anne, but with the same quality of forthrightness and a quickness of wit that took Sarah by surprise until she’d got to know her better.

  It was only when the family went back to Dublin in January that she realised the winter that she had been dreading had been busy and productive and was now moving forward at great speed. There were times when she felt she missed John even more as the months went by, but the loneliness she had imagined was certainly mitigated by all the new friends she had made.

  Often, after a taxing morning, Sir George would insist she left for home before it was fully dark, so she indeed had the long dark nights she had dreaded. But when she’d been dreading them, she hadn’t been able to think that those same long evenings would give her time to make a third new dress, to sew small garments for the Thursday market and to write to her friends, particularly Helen in South Carolina, Ben in Peterborough, Ontario, Jonathan Hancock in Yorkshire and her brother Charles in Lurgan.

  Charles had never been a keen letter-writer, unlike Jonathan, who had asked her permission to write to her privately as well as via Sir George and their correspondence over the workhouse, but Charles had now become a regular correspondent for the happiest of reasons.

  Sometime after Sarah’s meeting with Jonathan and her telling him about her plan to encourage women to make garments for sale, she had a long and very cheerful letter from Charles. He said he’d had good news, but it had been totally unexpected and he hadn’t quite taken it all in as yet.

  He explained he’d been advertising in a local Lurgan paper to try to sell surplus stock and he’d been contacted by a prospective buyer. What emerged from their meeting was that rather than simply buy the stock, this gentleman wanted to rent his workshop, use the existing stock and then bring in fabric from a source he already had in order to give employment. What he needed, he said, was a skilled labour force, stock to make a beginning and someone to manage the process.

  Charles was clearly delighted. It was obvious that he didn’t want to go to America and leave his elderly adopted parents, but that, as he explained subsequently, was the only way he’d been able to imagine of supporting them, albeit from afar.

  Sarah had never known Charles so animated or so full of ideas. He seemed genuinely interested in her own efforts to sell clothes and to give women the chance to earn a decent wage from their work. He plied her with questions and kept her up-to-date with both his successes and frustrations.

  It was when he told her that his well-spoken and mature gentleman had contacts with some charitable society in Yorkshire that Sarah felt sure it was thanks to Jonathan that this project had been put in hand, a project which benefitted not only Charles, but all the weavers and finishers who had lost their employment in the Lurgan workshop over the last failing months.

  But her suspicions could certainly be kept secret, even if she did share Charles’s good news with Jonathan in the regular letters they now exchanged.

  The winter was tedious at times with grey skies and misting rain but there was never any need for Sarah to stay overnight at Castle Dillon or even to be prevented from getting there on time in the first place. Only on one morning did a sudden flurry of snow catch them on an exposed part of the road. She slowed down immediately, but Daisy seemed indifferent to the unexpected white flakes that swirled around them, melting as they touched the rough surface of the road. On the hawthorn hedges, the light flakes settled, creating a crisp dressing that then melted as suddenly as it had come, when the sun reappeared from behind the passing cloud.

  ‘Jewels on the tree,’ Sarah said aloud, thinking of her grandmother as the drops shimmered, catching the light, hanging suspended in the still air until they grew too large, then dropped, still shining, into the tangled grass of the hedgerow.

  But that was the only snow to come in what was to be a mild winter leading into an early spring. Sarah was grateful for the harmless weather. She knew it made life easier for everyone – she was especially aware of the cost of keeping a fire going and how hard it was for poor people who could sometimes buy food but could seldom pay for fuel as well.

  Reading her Armagh Guardian, a part of her work now, as well as something she would have chosen to do, she read of the increasing distress in areas where the textile industry was failing. She had never been to Belfast, but a report on the state of the weavers of fancy goods in Ballymacarrett was perfectly intelligible to her even if she didn’t know either the Queen’s Bridge, Conn’s Water or the lanes on both sides of the Holywood road.

  Out of 411 looms, 266 were unemployed, while of the remaining 175, a considerable number will be idle this week, for there is little or no prospect at present of webs being procured.

  She copied out the extract carefully into a letter she was writing to Jonathan.

  Tears sprang to her eyes completely unbidden. Yes, it was the sad plight of these families with no income but also, she admitted, she had seen in an instant her beloved John, a web of cloth on his shoulder after he had bumped into her in the main street of Lisnagarvey – an unromantic first meeting which had become a joke between them.

  She dried her tears and tried to go on with her letter, but her eyes misted over yet again. It was not simply the stark message of the newspaper she was copying into her letter:

  The people (194 families, over 1,000 people) are in positive want – in absolute danger of starvation, perhaps before another week unless effective relief be procured.

  It was the thought that she had a comfortable home, more friends than ever she’d had in her whole life, and that she had enough to eat and money in the bank. How could she return in love and give thanks for all she had without John, whom she had loved so dearly?

  And yet again she thought of her grandmother. ‘Do what you can, do it in love …’ Yes, there were things she could do, but she didn’t have to do it all herself. The important thing was to do what she could. She should give thanks every time she counted a pile of money to go out to women sewing by their own firesides.

  Mary-Anne had been doing most of the collecting of clothes for the market and the delivering of money from their sales, but then Scottie had offered his help. He would drive her to work on a Saturday morning, take Daisy out of the shafts and fit her up with a saddle lent by Sir George from the stables. Then, thanks to Sam Keenan who said he could always manage a day or two on his own, Scottie would deliver little envelopes of money to all the women on this side of Armagh, while Lily and Harry Magowan did the same job for the women in the city.

  ‘Ask and it shall be given,’ another of grandmother’s sayings.

  She smiled suddenly, her sadness passing as she thought of Sam Keenan’s more robust version. ‘Well, if ye niver ask, ye’ll niver get!’

  He had a point, and perhaps it was one she should pay more attention to. Being self-reliant was one thing, but not accepting graciously your own limits was another. Perhaps there was more she could do to address the ocean of need she knew existed if she asked for help.

  Smiling again, she went back to her let
ter to Jonathan and asked him what he thought could be done for the weavers of Ballymacarrett, and indeed all the textile workers in Ulster at present in such distress.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Sarah could hardly believe that even before the end of April she could no longer wear either the plum dress or the newer sage green one which had sustained her through both autumn and winter. Both of them were already too warm, even in the large rooms and airy spaces of Castle Dillon. Everyone agreed, ‘Sure we’ve had no winter this year.’

  Taking out her much-loved blue dress from the chest in her bedroom on the last Saturday in April 1846, Sarah shed tears. This was the dress she had made for her wedding in early April, three years ago. It was also the dress in which she’d driven to Castle Dillon to ask Sir George if he would allow her to postpone her rent for six months.

  It was, of course, the dress in which she’d been approached by Jonathan Hancock in the library of Castle Dillon when Sir George had informed him that there was a woman ‘of his persuasion’ already waiting.

  That was when he had first spoken of her as a ‘sensible woman’.

  She smiled as she stood at the ironing board gently coaxing away the creases in the light fabric. She thought of both Sir George and Jonathan, now good friends in different ways. Sir George had refused her delayed payment when she’d offered it to him this very week. He’d said promptly that she could enter it in her records as a ‘bonus for effort beyond the call of duty’.

  More than once, Sir George had insisted she’d saved his sanity and she’d had to admit when she thought back to those towers of papers and the missing documents to which they referred, that he did have a point. It would be wrong not to give thanks for her achievements and the appreciation it had brought her.

  But on this lovely, warm April day, she still had to face the anniversary of John’s death. This year, the date fell on a Sunday, but whether it was the day or the date on the calendar, she doubted if she could ever forget that sunlit spring day he went off to Armagh, smiling and waving goodbye, and his return, a white-faced figure sprawled on a door carried by colleagues and neighbours.

  She knew how that image had haunted poor Scottie who’d kept lookout from the pillar with the best view down the road. He had wept in her arms more than once, as the memory came back to him. There was little comfort she could give him except an attempt at reassurance that she would look after him.

  Now Scottie, inches taller than this time last year and growing in confidence all the time, was part of the team running the marketing of handmade clothes. He had even found some women in need of work living in Loughgall, near the old schoolmaster who now enjoyed his visits as once he’d welcomed Ben.

  Dear Ben. That was another event she’d never forget, when he’d found his voice and then amazed both Scottie and Sam Keenan. Ben wrote regularly both to her and to Scottie and sent what dollars he could spare to help Scottie take care of his granny. Ben’s own old nurse, whom he’d supported as best he could on an apprentice’s allowance, had indeed died shortly after his departure.

  Things change and one must move with change, she reflected, thinking of her brother, now hard at work again in the Lurgan workshop and Jonathan Hancock, now very much her friend; Jonathan, who was currently in north Donegal looking at the possibility of improving the diet of the poorest people. Fish, he said, in his most recent letter, were very plentiful around their coasts, but only accessible in the best of weather when their flimsy curraghs were able to be put to sea. He’d told her then how he was looking for some Scottish fishermen who would come and teach them to use the new boats being bought for them by one of the wealthy landowners.

  Suddenly, weary of being indoors when the sun was beaming golden shafts of light on the well-swept kitchen floor, she put her iron back to heat on the hearth and went and stood at the door, her eyes dazzled by the bright light.

  ‘Good mornin’, Mrs Hamilton. Are ye enjoyin’ the sun?’

  The voice was familiar, the figure indistinct through watering eyes, but when she shaded them she beamed with pleasure. Paddy McCann, the good-hearted man who had offered her a good price for the mending of the damaged trap. And an impressive job he had made of it.

  She insisted he come in for a mug of tea and a bit of cake while the edgy black stallion who pulled his own trap was shoed by Scottie, to whom Sam left all the shoeing these days.

  He told her he was glad to see her looking so well, that he’d heard about her job at Castle Dillon as well as the good work she was doing for the home workers. He asked, predictably, if the trap was going well and she was glad to be able to tell him that in all honesty without his work on the trap the clothes market on a Thursday would never have happened, never mind her daily drives to Castle Dillon.

  ‘Ach, sure isn’t that great,’ he said beaming with pleasure. ‘D’ye mine you were lukin’ to sell it after poor John went? Isn’t it a mercy that no one was after it when you were a bit short o’ money? You couldn’t do either of yer jobs now wi’out it. Now, if it ever gives ye a problem, yer to send young Scottie straight over on Daisy an’ I’ll either come and fix it here, or I’ll lend ye my trap to put Daisy in, till I can see m’ way to do it. An’ there’ll be no charge,’ he added vigorously, as he drained his mug and stood up.

  ‘One good deed deserves another, an’ I’d not be much good with a needle an’ thread,’ he added, laughing, as Scottie appeared at the door to tell him he’d taken his horse for a drink at the trough and had left him tethered in the shade behind the forge.

  Within days of Paddy’s visit, the weather had settled even finer and drier than in April. Already in the first week of May, the hawthorn blossom was weighing down the branches of the hedgerows and filling the air with its sweet perfume. When a brief, pleasant shower began to settle the dust round the entrance to the forge early one Sunday evening, Sarah put down her sewing and stepped outside to feel the warm rain on her face. She laughed at herself. When in her life had she ever celebrated a shower of rain?

  But she was not the only one to celebrate. Two days later, the Armagh Guardian reported the brief shower of Sunday night saying, ‘more of which would be very desirable to the farmers’. It then went on to do a round-up of news from surrounding areas saying that the crops around the district of Moy and Charlemont looked remarkably well and healthy, and so ‘forward’ in that district was the season that a field of upland hay had already been cut and cocked.

  Provisions of every sort are abundant, they added, and are comparatively cheap: potatoes three and a half pence to four and a half pence a stone, several samples of new ones having been brought to market. At Aughnacloy, the potato market on Wednesday was so very large that room could scarcely be found for all the carts.

  Sarah reported this heartening news to Jonathan in Donegal adding that her neighbour, Billy, said he’d never seen such vigorous growth so early in the year.

  Jonathan replied immediately saying it was splendid news – for with a generous crop the merchants could not afford to store potatoes till the price went up as they had the previous year. Provided the markets were full of sound potatoes, there was at least a source of food, the problem being the lack of the wherewithal to purchase for those with no cash income.

  He had noted, he said, in the last set of minutes she’d copied out for him that the number of admissions to Armagh Workhouse had gone up. Despite the good weather and hopeful predictions, free emigration schemes were again being advertised by landowners who saw no prospect of receiving their rents.

  Sarah read his letters avidly both for the information he shared with her and in the hope of getting some clue to his well-being. Although he wrote most regularly and with apparent enjoyment, she’d noticed at times a distinct hint of sadness in his letters. Perhaps, like herself, he got very tired and then could not lift his spirits. She wondered if he might have had bad news about his wife, of whom he never spoke, but she was almost sure that she’d not find out unless they could meet and talk face-to-face
. She hoped they might meet sometime in May or June before he went back to Yorkshire.

  In the meantime, the long, light days were filled with activity at Castle Dillon. For the first year, the extensive gardens around the house were in production. Fruit and vegetables were so prolific that the kitchen staff were overworked with bottling, jam-making and preserving. The outside staff, organised by Robert Ross, were responsible for delivering cartloads of produce to churches and chapels who had offered to deliver to those in greatest need.

  Many of the gentry who sat on the Guardian’s Committee with Sir George made similar arrangements for simply giving food to those in need in their immediate area, despite the contrary arguments that charity did not solve the problems and only public works providing labour for men would resolve the situation.

  As Sarah copied out details of discussions and disagreements to be sent to colleagues of Sir George, she felt her spirits falter. The more she knew about rents, and cess, and presentments, the more she saw the complexity of the situation. The ocean of need would not be resolved by the exceptional fine stems of heavy-eared wheat and oats brought into the Armagh Guardian office, nor the bumper crops they so happily predicted.

  The whole situation however changed one Friday evening when Mary-Anne arrived so red in the face from hurrying that she had to sit down at the table and lean on its worn surface till she got her breath back.

  ‘What has happened, Mary-Anne? Is Billy or one of the boys ill? Tell me what I can do to help,’ Sarah said, pulling out the wooden chair beside her and catching at her hand.

  Mary-Anne shook her head as tears welled up in her eyes.