Later, when the horses were unsaddled and dawn was about to break, the still silence along the river was broken by the sound of a man singing. His song was one of defiance and it went soaring up through the night sky like a challenge to anyone who was listening.
Can you rokra Romany?
Can you play the bosh?
Can you jaladry the staripen?
Can you chin the cost?
He was informing the bailiffs that the gypsies had outwitted them, had reached the other side of the river by the old routes. But if any bailiffs heard the song, they did nothing about it.
By the time the sun was fully risen above its eastern bed of pink and lavender clouds, the gypsies had been sleeping on the grass beside their horses for only a few hours. They lay like dead men with their heads on their rolled-up coats while their horses grazed around them; they had no fear of being trodden on because they knew that no good horse will ever stand on a human body if it can possibly avoid doing so.
Jesse Bailey lay on his front with his face turned towards the earth and his jet black hair tumbling over his neck. As the sun rose, his grey horse nuzzled his cheek and woke him up. Jesse grunted and slowly opened his eyes. The horse had its muzzle close to his face and was breathing softly on to him. He put up a hand to push it away but he smiled as he did so.
Wide awake now, he rolled over on to his back and stared into the vast bowl of sky above his head. The world looked brand new and smelt sweet, as if it had just been created. He was the first to waken and everything around him was totally silent. His spirits rose and he was filled with optimism. ‘I’ll do it, boy, I’ll find a way,’ he told the horse, remembering his thoughts of the previous night.
With the horse’s head still down beside him, he crouched on all fours and then slowly rose to his feet, stretching his back and raising his arms above his head as he did so then, very quietly, he tiptoed over the bodies of the other men and walked up to the point of the ridge with the horse ambling along behind him like a friend. Tumbled stones, some of them carved with the Norman dog’s tooth pattern or studded with worn old corbels from the ancient castle, were piled around him like a giant’s play bricks. He climbed on to a fallen arch stone and perched there like a sentinel, staring out over the panorama. Above his head the sun swam up higher, changing the colour of the sky from pinkish grey to pale blue and birds began singing in a glorious chorus from the massed trees along the banks of the two rivers.
As he watched, a heron went swinging along the surface of the water beneath him. It moved with long, slow wing strokes staring sharp-eyed into the deep brown pools of the Teviot where trout and salmon lingered. He felt companionship with the bird for it was poaching as he himself often did. On his other side spread the expanse of meadow that had once been a town and would come to life again today. He wondered if there were ghosts watching the preparations for the return of life to their haunting place.
Jesse raised his head and stared across the Tweed. The carpenters had completed their wooden footbridge on time and it stretched its yellow newness over the eastern twist of the Tweed. Crowds were crossing it already and from his eyrie, Jesse could see the first movements on the roads. Singly and in groups people were converging on St James’ Fair like ants; advancing from all directions in their hundreds, intent on a good day.
* * *
Meanwhile, in the big house of Sloebank, yawning maids straggled down from the attics to the cavernous basement kitchens where full daylight never penetrated. They rubbed their eyes and grumbled to each other for the house was full of demanding guests and there was much to be done. In his vast bedroom, His Grace the Duke of Maudesley was totally unconscious, lying on his back with his mouth open and snoring like a pig in his pagoda-like curtained bed. He dreamed of cockfighting and the vividness of his imaginings made him wake with an erection. Pity he’d not taken a girl to bed with him the night before but it didn’t matter, he’d probably not be able to keep it up anyway – hadn’t been able to for months. He lay among his pillows puzzling about his inconvenient impotence and remembering the days when he had been as rampant as a stallion. Something would have to be done about it… His thoughts ran on and he remembered it was Fair Day. The proceedings began at noon and when everything was well launched he would take his party over to see the attractions.
The blackamoor he was going to marry must be invited to join him – she was a beauty, thank God, so it was not going to be too much of a sacrifice. He’d have to ask her old villain of a father as well but what did it matter? He’d think about the fortune, mentally count the old man’s gold. James Aubrey Fox contemplated Odilie in memory and felt deep satisfaction. She was a delightful little thing but he’d have to do something about his impotence before he bedded her. Then he remembered how he could solve his problem. The gypsies would be over on the field today. He’d send to the old woman who made up potions. She’d fix him up – she’d done it before.
* * *
Thomassin rose early and pulled aside the tattered sacking that covered the window of her one-room home and stared out at the sky. Good, it promised to be fine so the first condition for casting Rachel’s spell was fulfilled. She stepped barefoot out on to the dewy grass and gazed into the sky. Clutching her hands together like someone praying she slowly whispered the magic word ‘Temon’. Then, for a second time she said it, more confidently this time – ‘Temon’. After that she paused for a few seconds, cocking her head as if to listen for an answer but the only sounds were of cocks crowing somewhere on the other side of the village. With a laugh the girl threw back her head and shouted it out, ‘TEMON’! A dog began barking in the cottage next door and in the distance she heard a baby starting to cry. She stood defiantly on the grass, brushing her tangled hair back from her face with both hands while optimism flooded into her. She was positive that the spell was going to work and that before nightfall a man was going to fall desperately in love with her. That man would be Jesse Bailey.
* * *
In Havanah Court Canny Rutherford turned heavily between Melrose-made linen sheets in his bed with the dark green velvet curtains that shut out the creeping light of day. His mind was going over and over the same old track and once again he asked himself if he was doing the right thing by his girl. Was an exalted title enough to make up for marrying a man she did not love?
When he was young, he told himself, folk didn’t think of love as a prerequisite for marriage. Parents picked a husband or wife for their children because of suitability – looking for someone from the right background or with property that would augment theirs. He’d been lucky because by the time he’d seen the girl who became his wife he was rich enough not to worry about dowries or parental approval so her parents received him well. They were Creoles with French names, whose complacency had been shaken by the news of revolution coming from France where members of their family were losing their heads at the guillotine. To marry their daughter to an Englishman – and it had been impossible for Canny to make them appreciate the difference between a Scotsman and an Englishman – seemed ideal.
Jacqueline became his bride within three months and brought a sugar plantation with a lovely house in the middle of it with her as a dowry. Best of all, she fell in love with him – a strange and unexpected burst of affection for a couple with twenty years between their ages. How devastated he had been when she died after only six years of happiness! Was it possible for Odilie to develop a similar passion for the bridegroom her father had so expensively procured for her? When Canny remembered the slack-mouthed Duke he doubted it.
In her pretty room with its curtains of rose-patterned chintz at the other end of the broad corridor the object of Canny’s concern was dreaming of her birthplace. She was back beneath rustling palm trees with sand so white and soft that it felt like silk between her toes. Then she was sitting in the old garden swing being pushed to and fro by her nursemaid big Elma, whose dear coal-black face was sweating beneath the brightly coloured turban that she wore wound rakishly around her
head. The swing stopped and Odilie turned round to see that Elma was smiling and holding out a cascade of grapes. Odilie took one and put it into her mouth. The grape was soft and juicy but the taste, instead of being sweet, was sour and acrid. She woke up feeling sick with her mouth filled by bile.
In a third bedroom on the same landing, Martha Rutherford was also dreaming. She had taken a long time to fall asleep the night before for her mind had been too full of what Grace had said about the woman she’d met in the old mill. Who was she, Martha wondered. How did she know about Grace’s mother? What had happened to poor Lucy anyway? Martha had not thought about that sad affair for years until Grace brought it all back but now she was haunted by the memory of Lucy being led away from her husband’s house by two law officers. Her glorious hair had been wild and uncombed and her face swollen with weeping. Martha had been walking down the street at the time and could not avoid seeing how Lucy stumbled along like someone on the verge of madness. That scene had begun haunting her dreams again and she worried about what chance a girl like Lucy would have had in the cruel world without money or protection. What sort of death was visited on her? Martha was sure that she could not have survived very long. Like a cage bird turned free, she would be pounced upon by the first crow that came along. When Martha eventually woke she felt deathly tired and deeply depressed. In spite of the glory of the morning, a sense of foreboding filled her.
* * *
The sense of dread that assailed Martha was not shared that bright morning by the crowd of people massing over in the middle of Jedburgh. Ten miles from Roxburgh field, this old town clustered around the majestic ruins of another crumbling abbey and there had been unprecedented activity in the streets since early morning. By seven o’clock dozens of people were assembled in the cobbled square alongside the abbey gate to watch Jake Turnbull, Provost of Jedburgh, preparing to lead his cavalcade off to St James’ Fair. Jake was a florid-faced burgher who had been born in Jedburgh and thought there was no place on God’s earth to equal it.
At half-past eight o’clock precisely, wearing a black bonnet with a red and white checked headband and an impressive golden chain of office around his neck, Turnbull mounted his charger in the square under the eyes of a gaggle of impressed folk who cheered when he settled his plump buttocks in the saddle. Then with a flourish of his whip, he stood up in his stirrups and yelled out in a hoarse voice, ‘Jeddart’s here! To Lauriston, lads!’
The townsfolk gave another ragged cheer and Turnbull’s retinue of twelve stout men, all well-primed with drink already although it was so early, lined up behind him. They looked like reivers about to make a raid on an ancestral enemy because they had the faces of warriors – craggy noses, lantern jaws and beetling brows. All they lacked were the steel bonnets that their ancestors wore when they went raiding but their grim expressions made it obvious that they were spoiling for a fight.
‘Jeddarts here! We’ll show ’em,’ cried Turnbull again to the gawping crowd on the cobbles of the square.
‘That’s right, Jake, you show those fancy folk in Lauriston that Jedburgh’s the best toon. They’re nothing but lackeys for that Duke. Jedburgh’s a free man’s place,’ shouted a bent old fellow who leaned on his stick in the front rank of bystanders. In his time, before rheumatics crippled him, he had often ridden in the cavalcade to St James’ Fair and had many memories of enjoyable fights with the men of Lauriston, for the two towns were at daggers drawn over the Fair and had been in that hostile state of mind for more than three centuries.
When Roxburgh town disappeared, its privileges and revenues were transferred by the king to the nearest royal burgh which was Jedburgh, because at that time Lauriston had not been awarded royal burgh status. Since then it had been an annual pleasure for the Town Council of Jedburgh to ride ostentatiously over and parade themselves through Lauriston’s streets before going to the big field and, with great ceremony, calling the burley for the opening of St James’ Fair.
Jedburgh not only enjoyed the right to open and police the annual event but, what was worse, it took one third of the considerable revenues from the Fair as well. The other two thirds went to the Duke of Maudesley and nothing went to Lauriston. That was the real bone of contention.
As Provost Turnbull and his men headed out of Jedburgh, more men came clattering out of the narrow vennels along the High Street and joined on to the end of his cavalcade. When the procession reached the town boundary, the Provost stopped and took off his chain of office which he slipped into a bag tied round his waist because there was no point in tempting highway robbery till he got to his destination. Then he’d put it on again to dazzle the Lauriston folk.
He took a swig from his brandy flask, checked that his saddlebags were full of stones for throwing back at the rabble that would be waiting for him in the rival town and, feeling as important as the Duke of Wellington, victor of Waterloo, gave an upward lift of his arm and signalled to his army to move.
On their travels they passed a waggon full of bonny laughing lassies and waved cheerfully to them not knowing they were the contingent from Wauchope’s farm at Morebattle. On that farm, as on many others that day, the animals had been fed early in the morning and the workers given permission to go fairing. Mary Scott had bribed a young ploughboy, who was not worried about how he smelt, with a silver sixpenny piece to feed the pigs for her and she spent the morning curling her hair with a pair of crimping tongs and titivating herself. When she heard wheels rumble up to the cottage door, as a final touch she drenched her carefully folded white neckerchief with Aunt Lily’s lavender water before running out. She was the last to climb aboard the big dray cart that was to carry all Mr Wauchope’s workers to the Fair. ‘Heavens take us a’, what’s the reek?’ asked the old man who was driving the massive pair of bay horses yoked between the shafts, and everyone, including Mary, laughed. Good humour prevailed.
At Fairhope, deep in the Cheviot Hills, there had been hustle and bustle since dawn. Tom and Adam had their work finished by the time sunlight suffused the sky and when they returned home from the hill, Catherine and Leeb had all the eggs collected and the hens fed; the pony groomed and contentedly tucking into a net of hay and the kettle singing on the hearth beside a slowly heaving pot of porridge.
Two metal irons were heating at the side of the fireplace and Catherine was using them to press her men’s trousers with great thumping thuds. The heat of the iron on the damp cloth which she laid on the trousers positioned on the kitchen table sent clouds of steam rising up around her. When Tom pushed open the door and saw her at this work he cried out, ‘Aw woman, couldn’t you have let us have oor breakfast afore you started wi’ the pressing?’
She didn’t even look up but went on thudding away with the iron, switching one for the other as soon as it lost its heat. ‘No I couldn’t. I’m wanting you two to look smart and no’ let me doon. And I’m wanting oot o’ here in plenty of time to meet Mary. We’ve to be at the bridge by twelve o’clock, mind. You can eat your porridge standing up for once,’ she scolded.
Tom stared at the clock on their mantelpiece and exclaimed, ‘But it’s early yet!’ though he knew there was no use trying to argue with Catherine when she was in a fever to get started. Her urgency transferred itself to the men and after a hurried breakfast, while Leeb bustled about tidying up the cottage and getting everything ready for their return at night, Adam and Tom took turns to wash in the water trough at the front door. Then they went into the parlour to dress in their best, freshly-pressed clothes.
When they emerged Catherine regarded them with satisfaction, proud to lay claim to such handsome fellows. Father and son stood tall in the kitchen, hair brushed and faces shining as she walked around them, scrutinising their outfits with a critical eye. It was always said among country folk that shepherds were more smartly dressed than other working folk for they were the aristocrats among farm servants, and she was determined that the Scott men would not let the calling down. Their plaid trousers fitted well and thei
r dark coloured jackets were carefully brushed and buttoned up over pristine white, stiffly starched shirts with high tied cravats. Tom wore his black bonnet with the heron’s feather – it was by way of being his trademark – but Adam was as usual bareheaded.
After close scrutiny Catherine declared herself satisfied and said, ‘That tailor’s done a good job for you this year though he was slow. We’ll maybe gie him another order. Aren’t you wearing a bonnet like your father, Adam?’
The young man shook his head. ‘No, Mam. It’s going to be a fine day. I’m no’ needing a bonnet.’
His little sister giggled and said, ‘He’s wanting to show off his bonny heid o’ hair, that’s why he’ll no’ put on a bonnet. The lassies all like his hair and they’ll notice him more if he’s not got it covered.’
Catherine scolded, ‘Dinna tease your brother, Leeb. Away you go and dress yourself now and don’t take long about it.’ She’d seen her son’s face flush at the jibes of his little sister. Maybe there was something up. Her maternal senses were alert though he had said nothing about any girl.
Before nine o’clock they were on their way, sitting two by two in the cart behind their fat pony who was none too keen to leave its stable and haul the family all the way to the Fair.
Catherine sat proudly beside Tom whom she regarded as the finest-looking man of his age in the whole Borderland. They made a handsome couple for she was tall and well-made too and looked as prosperous as any farmer’s wife in a striped bombazine dress with a white fichu draped across her breast. On her head was her feathered bonnet that only came out of its striped bandbox for special occasions. Pinned in the front of her bodice was her greatest treasure, a brooch in the shape of a loveknot that Tom had given her when they married.
She reached out and patted her husband’s arm. ‘D’ye mind the day we met?’ she asked with a sidelong smile.
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