by Ruth Glover
© 2002 by Ruth Glover
Published by Revell
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.revellbooks.com
Ebook edition created 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owners. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-4412-3935-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
To Hal
Best of husbands
Best of friends
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Other Books by Author
The arms of Robbie Dunbar! Was there another place to compare with them in the whole wide world? How many times had Tierney dreamed of them being around her, tight and warm, as they were now? How many times had she cried herself to sleep for lack of them? Never having felt them, still she knew how they would feel—hungry, loving, sheltering. A haven.
Having dared the dangers of wild and tossing seas, Tierney knew about the need for a haven. But hadn’t she declared that she would follow Robbie Dunbar to the ends of the earth? Even to Timbuktu, if necessary? And hadn’t Robbie gone off two years ago, as to the ends of the earth, and left her in Scotland, hopeless of ever seeing him again and helpless to do anything about it?
Saskatchewan was a far cry from Timbuktu, but it was no less inaccessible. Yet here she was, and—wonder of all wonders—here he was!
Standing in the circle of Robbie Dunbar’s arms—feet planted in the freshly turned furrow of a raw homestead, far, far from Scotland and all things familiar—Tierney felt herself to be in a dream. One moment, it seemed, she had been amid familiar mud-dabbed, straw-thatched crofts, the next, in the wilds of northern Saskatchewan.
Of course, it hadn’t been that simple. Or that quick.
But already fading from memory were the miseries of the long ocean voyage. Even the face of Ishbel Mountjoy, that intrepid advocate and employee of the British Women’s Emigration Society responsible for her move from Scotland to Canada, seemed dim and distant, in memory as in fact. All, all was forgotten in the feeling of unreality that gripped Tierney now.
But a horse, a very real horse, stomped a foot nearby, somewhere a bird sang, and the arms—the very real arms of Robbie Dunbar—tightened.
“Robbie . . . Robbie Dunbar . . . is it ye, Robbie? Is it yoursel’?”
Leaning her head back and raising her eyes to the suntanned face so close to her own, so close and so familiar, Tierney asked the question wonderingly.
Robbie’s arms—those arms denied her heretofore—seemed unwilling to let her go. His lips, the lips that had never kissed hers, pressed themselves into the abandon of her hair—her hat having fallen off as she ran—as he pulled her close again.
As clearly as though it were yesterday rather than more than two years ago, Tierney recalled their farewell moments high on the hillside above the small Scottish seaside town of Binkiebrae, he to leave forever for Canada, she to remain behind. Remain forever in Binkiebrae, and with few if any memories to cherish, just a dream of what might have been, of what she had always supposed would be, had taken for granted would be.
With all of life ahead, in which their love could ripen and come to fruition and fulfillment, Tierney and Robbie had never felt any urgency about it. Rather, they had accepted and nourished it with joy and satisfaction, allowing it to grow and deepen naturally, confident they had a lifetime to savor it. They, as their parents and grandparents before them and their parents and grandparents before them, and back and back, would settle into a croft of their own, becoming a small, insignificant but solid part of the history that was Binkiebrae’s. Robbie Dunbar and Tierney Caulder were meant for each other.
Then had come the shattering edict of Robbie’s father: Robbie and his brother Allan were to leave for the new homesteads opening in Canada and offered free to all comers. Eventually, if everything went well, the rest of the family would follow; certainly Robbie and Allan would never return.
With her mother dead and her own father dying, with no money and no hope of following, Tierney had seen her dreams crumple and die, that morning on the hillside, like a bud that had been cut down before it blossomed. And indeed, the possibility of her going with him, or even following at some later date, had not been mentioned or considered, so remote was the idea. Robbie Dunbar knew as surely as did Tierney that it was impossible. The parting was forever. He was going off to the ends of the earth; she was remaining in Binkiebrae. She was remaining, with no choice but to become a dried-up, lonely old maid. For with Robbie gone, love and marriage and children were gone; there would never be anyone for Tierney but Robbie Dunbar.
Even then, in their final moments together, with the wind skirmishing sadly about them and the distant sea sparkling like tears, Robbie had not kissed her. But he had touched her. Taking her chin in his hand, his eyes burning with unexpressed emotions, he had turned her face toward him. Tenderly he had placed a hand on each side of her face, her tear-streaked face, and looked deeply into her eyes. As though she were experienced in the tender art of kissing, simply and naturally Tierney had lifted her face. Her eyes closed, her heart breaking, she had lifted her lips to Robbie Dunbar.
But Robbie had not kissed her. With a low sound that from a less fine man would have been something between a curse and a groan, Robbie had dropped his hands and stepped back from her, clenching his jaws. “I canna, lass, I canna!” he had groaned. “I canna kiss ye, else I’d ne’er leave ye!”
And Robbie, resigned to his fate as she was to hers, had stumbled backwards, turned, and was off, leaping and bounding down the steep hillside, away from her. It was her last sight of Robbie Dunbar; it was her lasting nightmare.
After her father’s death, and Robbie long gone, Tierney had met up with Ishbel Mountjoy and her incredible offer: Sign up with the British Women’s Emigration Society, go to Canada, and experience a new life in a new land.
It had taken but a short moment’s consideration for Tierney to fling caution to the winds and join the throng of girls and women agreeing to become “domestics” on the prairies of distant Canada. Amazingly, it was at no cost to them, except that a part of their pay would be returned, for a while, to the government so urgently desiring their services. And though no one could see at the time that it would be so, these same domestics—eventually tens of thousands of them—would change history as they married, had children, and raised up a new generation of Canadians.
Most of them, however, had no intention of setting out to change the world; they were simply following the only opening there was; single women, particularly, had few if any options. Thus it was that Ishbel Mountj
oy’s proposal had sounded a note of hope that Tierney and others like her had been unable to resist.
For many of them it meant flight, flight from meaningless lives with no future. For Tierney it meant escaping a pointless existence in the home of her brother and his wife. That the flight took her halfway around the world, to end up in the expanse of prairie or the wilds of the bush, no matter!
Tierney, after a few months on Will and Lavinia Ketchum’s chicken ranch, accepted an opportunity to go northward, and had, earlier in the day, alighted from the train in the heart of the bush, or parkland, immediately falling in love with the flourishing growth, so different from the barren prairies to the south. She was met by Herbert Bloom, father of Lavinia, prepared to take up her duties as a domestic in the home of Herbert and his wife, Lydia.
The buggy ride from Prince Albert to Bliss had been a time of getting acquainted. Tierney told Mr. Bloom about Will and the chicken ranch. She told him the sad details of Lavinia’s death in childbirth. Herbert wanted to hear about his grandson, Buster, and how he was settling down happily with his new mother. Will, like others in the same situation, had found it expedient to marry quickly. Herbert, in turn, described the Bloom homestead, assuring her that he and Lydia were eager to have Tierney join their household, needing her badly. Lydia, he explained, was cruelly incapacitated with rheumatism and no longer able to keep up the many tasks required in the running of a farm.
They stopped at the small hamlet of Bliss to pick up the mail and, at various homes along the way, dropped it off, which was the custom and a friendly, helpful thing to do.
One final stop was the homestead of a young man who had recently taken up residence in the community of Bliss. They found him plowing, turning over the soil of his homestead for the first time. Tierney, cramped from the train and buggy rides, had offered to take the letter across the small field to him. Hopping from the buggy she sprinted, long-limbed and free as a feather, across the furrows, holding the letter aloft and calling for attention.
Herbert Bloom, waiting in the buggy, soon had cause to be astonished. The plowman, eventually hearing Tierney’s call over the sound of the team’s clopping feet and the roots tearing loose as the soil came free and rolled back, turned, froze in place, dropped the reins and ran, fleet as any colt, to meet the girl. The lassie, pausing momentarily, had taken flight into the arms of the man, a young man who was known only sketchily to Herbert Bloom, but who was, apparently, well-known to the girl Tierney Caulder, incredible as it seemed. Why else would a proper young woman fling herself into a man’s arms? And linger there, rocked there, weeping there? Herbert Bloom, unaccustomed to imaginations and flights-of-fancy, may be excused for gaping blankly.
For Tierney, it was enough, at the moment, to rest in the arms of Robbie Dunbar, to hear the broken words he was whispering into her hair. Her face was pressed to his chest, broad and strong, as she had known it would be, had known all her growing up years but had never experienced before. To think that here—in the rampant bush of the parkland strip of Saskatchewan, far from croft and brae and bracken, far from sea and shore, far from home and hearth—she would have come, as straight as a bird to its nest, to the arms of Robbie Dunbar.
“Aye, lassie, it’s me,” Robbie was saying huskily, adding, “an’ is it ye, Tierney Caulder, yersel’ so far from Binkiebrae and home? How can it be? Is’t a dream?”
Her renewed clutch, his tightened embrace, were answer enough.
It was the threatened straying of Robbie’s team that broke the spell.
“Whoa!” Robbie turned swiftly and reached for the fallen reins.
Loosed from his embrace, Tierney half-staggered for a moment, her head awhirl as the world slowly came back into focus. Pressing greenery—bushes and trees unknown to her—took the place of her barren Scotland hillside, and there was no wide and sweeping view of the sea; indeed, sight ended where the bush began. Tierney’s feet did not press Scottish soil but trampled the rich black dirt of a homestead in Canada’s west. Her nostrils were assailed by scents she had never known before—soil turned over for the first time, sweaty horses, growth so verdant and lush as to be almost overwhelming, flowers of unknown variety nodding heads in the ground at the edge of the small plowed plot. It all added up to perfume of a rare vintage, a fragrance she would always equate with this lovely, unexpected moment.
As Robbie got his team under control—they had been heading toward the small log buildings and the well with its hand-hewn water trough—and as Tierney’s bemused gaze focused again, she remembered the driver who had brought her here, still sitting in his buggy.
Herbert Bloom’s face was a study. His fading eyes blinked, his mouth had fallen slackly open, and his lips were puckered as if in a soundless whistle.
And no wonder! What a sight! This young woman, Tierney Caulder by name—recently employed on a chicken farm on the prairie, just off the train and committed to helping him and Lydia on their homestead in the bush—was sparking with a strange young man. One didn’t expect, when merely stopping by to drop off the mail, that the person delivering it would be swept up into the arms of the one to whom the mail was addressed—Robert Dunbar, in this instance.
Herbert Bloom knew his neighbor slightly as a newcomer to the area of Bliss and recalled now that he had a decided Scots accent. Could they—the girl and the man—be old acquaintances? It was the only explanation that made sense. Herbert Bloom scratched his head, dumbfounded.
Tierney—her amber eyes and head of abundant auburn hair being her distinguishing features and chief claim to beauty—had seemed, to her prospective employer, a self-controlled, well-mannered, perfectly normal young woman when she had alighted from the train in Prince Albert, eminently suited to meet the needs of the Bloom household.
Now, here she was—having started out sedately enough across the fresh-turned sod to give a letter to a stranger—dazedly picking up the hat that had flown from her head when that man had turned toward her and she had run to meet him. No wonder Herbert Bloom was transfixed by the strangeness of it all.
While she scrabbled in the earth for her hat, the man was getting his team under control. He turned, took the girl Tierney’s hand in his own, and together they made their way over the furrows toward the buggy waiting at the edge of the field.
It was all too much for a staid Englishman like Mr. Bloom. He sat in his rig holding the reins numbly, his aging face sagging with the perplexity of his thoughts. If this didn’t beat all! What a story to tell Lydia! The very idea brought him up short—Lydia! That proper lady would be shocked at the improper goings-on he had just observed.
Ahem! Herbert Bloom straightened himself, cleared his throat, swallowed, and attempted to look stern. But his kindly heart melted at the joy he saw pouring from the countenances of the young people approaching the buggy. Rather than an expression of disapproval, it was a face full of curiosity that Herbert raised toward Tierney Caulder and Robbie Dunbar as they stepped from the last furrow and walked—floated—to the side of the buggy.
“Mr. Bloom.” Robbie Dunbar held out an earth-stained hand, grasping one that was equally work-worn, if cleaner at the moment, and shook it heartily.
“Good day to you, Mr. Dunbar,” Herbert Bloom answered automatically.
For a second or two, under the midday sun, a silence fell. The young people were starry-eyed but tongue-tied, and Herbert was merely at a loss for words. The birds of the bush filled the moment with outpourings of song, the horse’s harness creaked as he shifted his feet, the buggy jiggled as the older man shifted his weight.
“Ah,” Herbert began, “it would seem . . .”
Robbie and Tierney were looking at each other again, and though there was now no physical touch, there was an intimacy apparent in their very absorption with one another.
“Ahem.” Herbert cleared his throat again and, with a start, the young man and woman turned back toward him.
“Mr. Bloom?” Robbie asked quickly.
“It seems to me,�
�� Herbert Bloom said to their lifted faces, “that you two may know each other. Either that or you’ve gotten acquainted very quickly! You must be old . . . friends, or,” he added, and who could blame him if he spoke dryly, “perhaps . . . more.”
Merry laughter from Tierney, along with a pretty flush to her cheeks. As for the young man, Mr. Bloom’s words seemed to bring a startled look to his face.
“Miss Caulder and I,” Robbie Dunbar said slowly, “are from the same place in Sco’lan’—”
“Binkiebrae,” the girl interjected rather breathlessly, as though the place were heaven’s gate.
“Aye, Binkiebrae,” Robbie Dunbar affirmed. “We thought niver to see each other again. I can hardly believe—”
The eyes of the young man turned again, this time in sheer disbelief, on the handsome girl at his side, made even more vivid because of the color suffusing her face and the light of happiness setting her eyes aglow. Ah yes, it was a happy meeting, even an amazing one, all things considered. What were the odds, Herbert wondered fleetingly, of coming half a world from all things familiar only to run straight into the arms of someone you knew? And knew very well, if appearances meant anything. The odds were against it, for sure. Unless, that is, one were a praying person. Herbert Bloom was a praying person himself and could see the possibilities, could even see the impossibilities that could be surmounted if one indeed prayed.
“Ah . . . Binkiebrae,” Herbert repeated for lack of anything better to say and still much in the dark about the whole thing. “Both from, er, Binkiebrae . . .”
It was as if all three of them were mesmerized by something, perhaps the rare combination of sounds that made up the name Binkiebrae, and silence fell again. The man Robbie Dunbar cleared his throat.
“This land . . . this homestead,” he began, speaking primarily to the girl, explaining to the girl, “is mine. This is what I came over to find; this is what me da had in mind for me. I filed on it all legal in Prince Albert, at the Lands Office. Allan, me brother,” he said, turning to Mr. Bloom momentarily, “filed on the quarter section next to this. Maybe y’ know him. Together,” he said, with an exultant note to his voice, “we hae half a section. And wi’ any kind o’ luck,” his glance wavered, “we’ll be able to get the other quarters of the section.”
