St James' Fair

by St James Fair (retail) (epub)

  On the night when the two girls in Lauriston were staring at its smiling face, the moon also cast its silver radiance over the ragged thatches of the gypsy houses of Kirk Yetholm and, one by one, it lured shadows out of broken front doors. Men met beneath the overhanging eaves and lounged about with their hands in their pockets, whispering to each other in a language that was incomprehensible to people not of Romany blood. The Kirk Yetholm gypsies spoke a sort of bastard Romany muddled up with local words and never talked it unless they were sure that no Gorgio could overhear them.

  The men gathered in the shadows, carrying thick cudgels in their hands and with skinny and predatory hounds lurking at their heels. Only males gathered in the darkness for the women and children, who did most of the day to day work and the selling of gypsy wares, were abed and asleep by the time the moon rose. Its radiance delighted the men, however, for it lit the way when they went poaching or lurking around farmyards looking for ways of helping themselves to feed for their horses.

  Local farmers always dreaded the days before St James’ Fair because it was then that the gypsies had their greatest need for hay and corn. With no land of their own on which to grow food for their animals – and no desire for a life of drudging husbandry even if they had owned land – it was unthinkable for them to purchase any hay and corn but they had an insatiable need for horse fodder and so they stole what was required. There was little anyone could do to stop them and it was better not to try because, if they had no reason to dislike a farmer, they only took a little on a regular basis from his barns and haystacks. If he did something to annoy them however, they plundered him like rapacious Vikings. Farmers soon learned to accept their losses with good grace for fear of worse reprisals.

  This year the gypsies’ need for fodder was even greater than usual because they had gathered together an unusually large number of horses. The end of war with France had meant that returned soldiers up and down the countryside were selling off their old chargers, some of them fine animals with a lot of life left in them. On the grassy spread of common land in the middle of Kirk Yetholm village, twenty hobbled horses were pegged out in lines, an unprecedented number which had been gathered from far and near over the summer to sell at St James’ Fair. There were plenty of fine horses available in 1816 and the gypsies had taken their pick of the best of them.

  Overlooking the green was a tumbledown house belonging to a gypsy family called Faa and there the men were gathered waiting for their leader. At last the door opened and a tall man stood framed in the doorway. One of the lingerers whistled and cried softly, ‘We’re here, Gib. Where’s Jesse?’

  ‘With his blewre probably,’ said the new arrival. The moonlight showed him to be a tall, well-built man with a crest of snow-white hair that sprang up vigorously on his proudly carried head.

  His silver-grey sideburns were thick and uncut so that his brown face was edged by a bushy fringe that almost met on the point of his chin. It gave him the look of a lion and he had a lion’s kingly air too, which made all the other men defer to him. He gestured to a young lad at the back of the crowd and said, ‘Run over to Thomassin’s and see if Jesse’s there.’

  After a few minutes the messenger came back alone. ‘He’s not there. She hasn’t seen him all day and she says she’s spoiling to chin his curlo if she finds him.’

  The white-haired man called Gib laughed hoarsely. ‘She’d better not cut his throat. We need him at the Fair. He’s the best horseman in the whole Border. Anyway she’s no claim on him, she’s not rommed to him – not yet.’

  ‘If they’re not wedded yet it’s not for want of her trying, and she’s a grasni shantu. He’d better marry her before somebody else does,’ said a dark-haired, shifty-looking man called Abel who stood at the back of the group.

  Gib replied shortly, ‘That’s his business, Abel. Thomassin should remember that the harder you try to force some men, the more they stick in their heels – like horses. Come on, the dude’s bright up there in the sky and the merryfeet are running. I fancy rabbit stew tomorrow.’

  Soundless as shadows they drifted off towards a cluster of trees that could be seen spread out like a carpet on the side of a hill that rose behind the village. While they were climbing the last slope, another man emerged from the wood in front of them and ran down towards Gib, who greeted him with an uplifted hand and asked shortly, ‘Where’ve you been, Jesse? We sent the chal to Thomassin’s looking for you.’

  ‘Just wandering about,’ was the casual reply. Jesse’s dark hair fell down at the back of his neck in thick, luxuriant curls like a girl’s but that was the only effeminate thing about him because he had a strong and striking face with a high-bridged nose and daring dark eyes that could make women feel strangely weak when he chose to exert his power on them. It was generally acknowledged among all the Yetholm folk that Jesse Bailey was a very taking man.

  ‘You’ve been doing a bit of faking, I hope. What did you pick up?’ asked Gib. He was the ‘king’ of their community and had already decided that although he had sons of his own, his successor should be this wayward but favourite nephew. He was grooming Jesse as his inheritor and the young man had a lot of learning to do yet.

  ‘I’ve not stolen anything so far. I was just wandering about looking at things,’ was the disappointing reply to Gib’s question.

  ‘And you’ve probably got a book in your pocket,’ said the uncle in disgust. He looked at Jesse with a despairing expression but the young man only patted the pocket of his short blue jacket and laughed as he asked, ‘Can you see through cloth, too? Don’t dukker me, Gib.’

  ‘I don’t need to be a fortune-teller to know you’ve a book. That minister in the village didn’t do you any favours when he taught you to read, my lad. He only filled your head with rubbish.’

  Jesse sighed. There was no use protesting to Gib Faa, his mother’s brother, who knew him well. His uncle was the head of their community and guardian of their traditions. Illiterate himself, Gib scorned scholars and put far more stock in gypsy lore and in a man’s adroit ability to survive in arduous conditions than in anything that could be read in books. But when Jesse was eight years old he had been ill, victim of a virulent typhus fever that killed many of the gypsy children that year. The local minister, a saintly man who worried about the immortal souls of the pagans in his parish, noticed Jesse’s mother’s anguish about her melting eyed boy and saw to it that nourishing food was sent to the Bailey hovel every day. Miraculously the child recovered, although he was still very weak when summer and the travelling time came round. Then the minister persuaded Jesse’s mother to let her son stay with him and his wife in the manse instead of going wandering. When she came back in the autumn, her boy, fed all summer on eggs and cream, vegetables and slices of roast beef by the doting childless couple, was not only strong and healthy again but he had been taught to read and write. A new world had been opened up for him although the gift of learning that had been given him was in time to prove a mixed blessing. It introduced him to a morality very different from the Romany code, to a new way of thinking about and looking at things. It put longings and questions into his mind that were making him deeply unsettled. The gypsy part of his nature, which was strong, fought with this enchantment for books that enthralled him and he was unable to break this strange addiction.

  ‘Thomassin’s after you. Rake tute,’ warned Gib.

  Jesse shrugged. ‘That’s all right, I’ll look after myself. She’ll cool down. She’s too hasty.’

  ‘She wants you for her rom,’ Gib told him.

  ‘I’m not ready to marry yet,’ was the short reply.

  ‘You’re twenty-two. That’s old enough for marrying and she’s nineteen, a fine chavi – her mother’s my mother’s cousin.’

  ‘I know all that. I’ll probably do it in the end but I don’t want to be hurried,’ said Jesse curtly. He wondered what point there would be in trying to explain to Gib how he dreamed of escape, how much he wanted to see the world beyond the gy
psy routes. How could he tell his uncle that he wanted to leave behind the established routine of stealing and gambling, fighting and drinking. The thing he loved best beside books was the horse and his skill as a rider was renowned far outside Yetholm. Jesse knew that this ability could be exploited as a passport to the world where it would help him escape from the clutches of his gypsy culture and travel to where his talent would find him new opportunities. But that was only a dream, for he knew that Gib had fingered him as the next gypsy leader and it seemed as if his destiny was cast. Nothing was going to change it.

  By now they were in the depths of the wood and with low whistles, the gypsies were setting their dogs on to carefree rabbits that skipped about in the grassy glades beneath the trees. It was not long before the men had a big enough catch to fill their capacious pots at home and they turned to trek back down the hill. As they left the wood, Gib took his nephew by the arm and pointed over to a farmsteading surrounded by a circle of tilled fields in the next valley.

  ‘Go over to Turnbull’s and take a few sheaves out of his stack,’ he instructed.

  ‘But we took from him yesterday,’ protested Jesse.

  ‘Oh, he’d be disappointed if we passed him by,’ laughed Gib and pushed the young man off in the required direction.

  Though he made no objection to his uncle’s order, as he slipped soundlessly along in the shadow of a stone dyke, Jesse reflected on how little he enjoyed stealing. During that boyhood summer of his illness the old minister had drummed into him that stealing was a sin and not only punishable by law – which he knew already – but by God as well. This was a concept that had never occurred to him before. The idea that there was an omnipotent God in Heaven watching everything men did was deeply unsettling to Jesse.

  ‘I’m tired of all this,’ he said to himself as he slipped into the silent farmyard. He wasn’t only afraid of being caught but was also tired of doing something that had become second nature to him. He’d done it so often that it was too easy but there was always danger, for every time he filched a bale of straw or a spare bridle off a saddleroom hook, he knew there was a chance of some farmer sticking a gun in his back or worse, for if he was hauled before the law, he was in danger of being strung up on the gibbet. Magistrates did not think twice about hanging gypsies: it was an inevitable end for them. Only three months before, Jesse’s own older brother had been strung up for sheep-stealing near Dumfries. He remembered how he’d felt as he watched, bitter-faced and stoical, while the corpse swung to and fro on the rope’s end. His predominating thought had been, ‘What a useless way to end a life!’

  He was not caught in Turnbull’s yard that night, however, for he was as silent as a ghost and knew his way around the yard almost as well as the man who owned it. He’d been there so often that the dogs knew him and did not bark. Filling a sack from the corn kist he heard midnight strike from the church clock in the village below him and then he turned and ran back to Kirk Yetholm with a bale of hay on his back and sack of corn over one shoulder.

  Jesse was the last of the men to return to the village and while he was stacking the hay and pouring the corn into a bin at the back of Gib’s home, he did not know that a pair of dark and flashing eyes were watching him from a window on the other side of the row. Thomassin Young wondered if she should step out and speak to him but caution held her back. Jesse was difficult to handle and she was determined to snare him in the end. She’d kept herself for him, she’d put it around that they were bespoken to each other and she was intent on snaring him with ropes of silk, but she knew that her task would be difficult – he would take a lot of careful handling before she had him to herself.

  Chapter 4

  Friday, 31 July

  By the time most people in Lauriston were stirring in their beds, in the hills that formed the border with England, two men were making their way back home after finishing their morning’s work. Mist drifted around them like fairy hair as, with the long easy strides of people accustomed to walking in rough country, they descended from the top of Woden Law. Deep in the valley below their feet, the Kale Water twisted and turned with a thin fringe of scrubby trees of hazelnut and rowan along its banks.

  The men were Tom Scott and his twenty-one-year-old son Adam. Both looked satisfied, for though it was not yet seven o’clock they had covered a thousand acres of hill and ‘taken tent’ of the eight hundred sheep that were in their care. The Scotts were hired shepherds employed to take care of a rich man’s flock in the hills where their ancestors had lived and worked for centuries before the land was enclosed by their overlords and sold off as farms. At one time the Scotts had earned their tenancy of those lands by their swords but when the fighting years were over, the country was divided up among richer men and by an unstoppable movement, the Scotts found themselves servants to an owner whom they rarely saw. They were proud and valuable men nonetheless because they knew the hills around them like no one else and they were loyal to the man who paid their wages.

  They rarely spoke while they walked the hills, only pausing now and then to whistle orders to the three black and white collie dogs called Jess, Birk and Rab that were running at their heels. The dogs moved eagerly, bellies low to the ground, heads down and scarlet tongues lolling in anticipation of the hot meal that awaited them in the huddle of greystone buildings which could be seen far away on the valley floor beside the river. Every now and again men and dogs all lifted their heads and took a bearing on the biggest house that gave out as an enticing signal a trickle of smoke curling up from its chimney. This was the Scotts’ home, Fairhope, an ancient steading that had once seen Roman legions march past its front door. Today, however, it stood isolated and lonely by the side of a narrow track, all that was left of the broad Roman roadway that could be followed all the way to York from their little valley. As far as they were concerned, its importance was that it was their only link with the village of Hownam four miles away.

  Time stood still in their deep and mysterious country of rounded hills and hidden valleys between England and Scotland. The men, their dogs and the birds that flew up before them uttering wild cries had the universe to themselves, a world that had remained unchanged and untouched for aeons. As the sun rose it revealed a landscape of fold upon fold of land of sensual curves. The crowded hills, rising one after the other in a never ending perspective, looking like sleeping giantesses lying on their sides with their heads pillowed on outflung arms and their hipbones and shoulders jutting up into the sky. Their flanks were marked by an occasional boundary wall or a circle of stone. These enclosures were shelters into which the sheep were herded during bitter weather or when the shepherds wanted them all together for shearing or lambing. The hillsides were tinged with streaks of lavender and purple where the heather was beginning to flower and from a distance, as the sun rose and cast its radiance over the world, the universe looked as if it had been washed by the brush of a celestial painter.

  In those lonely hills there was an immense empyrean of sky, pale blue and marked today by no clouds. It gave the promise of another brilliant day which rejoiced the men as they walked through their paradise. Both father and son had an air of remoteness that cloaked them with an impressive dignity and set them apart from the hired men on lowland farms, for the isolation in which they lived had invested them with an extra dimension, expanded and glorified them as if they were party to a secret that other people never learned.

  The impression they gave, looming out of the mist, was of a pair of heroes from a Greek myth and this illusion was enhanced by the tall crooks topped by curved finials which they carried. The Scotts were both tall and lean with erect shoulders and proudly carried heads. Tom’s hair and beard were grizzled and his face deeply tanned and wrinkled by exposure to all kinds of weather over forty years of shepherding but his son was brightly blonde, fresh-skinned and clean-shaven. Black and white checked plaids were loosely draped around their shoulders and Tom wore a black cocked bonnet with a grey heron’s feather stuck into the he
adband.

  As they strode down the hillside towards Fairhope, Tom Scott gave a piercing whistle and the dogs ran back towards him, clustering at his heels. He led them to a low-roofed shed, opened the green-painted door and ushered them inside. Catherine his wife had been watching for her men coming down the hill and on the shed floor she had laid out three big pans of steaming meal with a few scraps of vegetables on top. Each dog knew its own dish and went straight for it.

  The shepherds then carefully scraped their boots on an iron boot cleaner at the cottage door, hung their crooks on a metal hook that stuck out of the stone wall and, after washing their hands in the stone water butt and slinging back their plaids, bent their heads in order to enter the low doorway of their home.

  Fairhope was an ancient bastle house, once fortified like a castle with walls so thick that no frost ever penetrated them. The living quarters were on the first floor while the animals were stabled at ground level. In winter it was always warm inside and in summer the temperature stayed pleasantly cool. In the kitchen, the windows were tiny with only four little greenish panes set in deep embrasures and they were fringed by fluttering curtains of white hung from polished brass hoops on a cane pole. The interior walls were whitewashed every year and the floor was laid with broad stone flagstones that shone a pale cream colour, whitened by centuries of regular scrubbing. In the blackened cavern of the fireplace, a copper kettle was boiling merrily from a ‘swee’ hung over the flames, and something delicious was sizzling on an open griddle.