The Crofter's Daughter

by Eileen Ramsay

  ‘Oh, Lord Advocate would be enough,’ laughed Ferelith, but Blair’s mother did not smile.

  ‘In my day girls stayed at home to look after their families.’

  ‘But I have no family,’ said Ferelith quietly, ‘and so I must earn a living.’

  ‘Shall we have lunch?’

  In four seemingly neutral little words, Helena Crawford managed to convey her dislike, her distrust, her implacable opposition to this girl. Why? Why? What had Ferelith done? Or was it what Ferelith was?

  No, it would never work until Mother was forced to see that unless she accepted this working-class girl from a Glasgow orphanage, she would lose her son too.

  I can’t give her up, Blair decided, as he sipped a very fine pre-lunch sherry.

  Sometimes his feelings for Ferelith frightened him. Since that day two years ago when he had walked into the large lecture hall in the university and seen her standing there like a terrified rabbit caught in the gaze of a headlight, she had been more important than eating or sleeping, and far more important than his studies. She was part of him, and how it had happened he could not understand. Their backgrounds were so different. His was privileged: nannies, governesses, servants who anticipated every wish of the fatherless little boy, Eton but not Oxford. He had never worked hard enough. Why should he? He had inherited an estate and the fortune to support it on his eighteenth birthday. He had never wanted anything enough to work for it, not until Ferelith. And why Ferelith?

  She had inherited nothing on her eighteenth birthday. There had been nothing to inherit. She had been brought up in an orphanage in Glasgow where one of the sisters of the religious teaching order had recognised her not inconsiderable brain and had fought for the girl’s right to further education. Who her parents were and why she had been in the home Ferelith did not know. Blair did not care. The skinny girl with the badly cut hair, the obviously secondhand clothes and the bitten nails was his future. He was not given to introspection. He marvelled at the kismet that had made Ferelith as familiar to him as the skin on his face and he accepted his fate.

  *

  Ferelith did not, at first, approve of his plan, the simple but so obvious little plan that had occurred to him somewhere between the sherry and the port his mother had insisted on offering him, because Grandpapa always had port, dear.

  ‘We can’t, Blair. It’s against everything I’ve ever been taught to respect. We’ll wait: she’ll come round when she sees how much we love one another.’

  Blair’s heart gave a sickening lurch inside him. Dear God, how he wished that were true.

  ‘She doesn’t care,’ he said quietly, and in saying that and admitting that, he grew up. ‘My mother has had her own way all her life. You can’t believe how much my grandfather spoiled her. She will never accept you because she has not written a nice, brainy, skinny, working-class Catholic orphan into her life script.’

  ‘When she sees that we mean to continue friends . . .’

  ‘I don’t mean to continue friends . . . at least I do, but I want us to continue as husband and wife. During that ghastly lunch I saw so clearly that you mean more to me than she does. I love her. I’m sorry that she has chosen to be as self-centred as she is and maybe that was Grandfather’s fault and my father’s. I don’t think he ever refused her anything either. It’s not good for children to get their own way all the time. I shall be very strict with all of ours.’

  Ferelith laughed and the ferocious scowl eased from his handsome face. ‘We’re going to have children, are we?’

  ‘Yes, five.’

  ‘After I become Lord Advocate or before, or are you going to have them?’

  ‘Don’t laugh. We can do this, Ferelith. I can support you. We’ll get married because I need you so much and you need me. With my money, and my name, it will be easier for you, and with your brains, spacing five children between court cases should be easy.’

  She was angry. He had forgotten how very sensitive she was about money. She thought about it, or the lack of it, all the time. He never considered it for a moment. It continued to flow when he wanted it just as the mighty Forth flowed through his fertile acres.

  ‘I did not fall in love with you because of your name.’

  ‘I know. That’s why I fell in love with you, though. There you stood in that ghastly frock Mother Superior found in the poor box and you said your name. Ferelith, a fairy princess. You cast a spell on me. It will remain until I die and even after death.’

  He was silent and it was her turn to wonder. How sensitive and romantic he was! If her life depended on it, she could not tell him that her love would continue through all time. She would want to say it: she would say it in so many ways but never never with words. But she would not marry him to ease her way through law school.

  ‘You have just been kidnapped, Miss Gallagher. I don’t think you noticed that we are now on the road to Gretna Green. I am going to marry you to save your good name because I have absolutely no intention of stopping this car until we reach the border. There I shall take you with or without benefit of clergy or blacksmith or whatever, and please don’t get into a Holy Roman snit because you can get things sorted out with your priest when we get back to university. Hell, we’ll need to find an apartment. I can’t take you into Residence.’

  ‘You’re being very childish, Blair. This isn’t the Middle Ages.’

  ‘Oh, Ferelith, Ferelith. I aged a hundred years this afternoon. I am older than time. Marry me. You want to, don’t you, and really, what does it matter whether you marry me before or after graduation. That’s surely academic. And if you marry me, you can keep me at work because if you are in the same room, even better in the same bed, then I won’t spend all my studying time writing sonnets to your funny little nose. You owe me a good education.’

  ‘I couldn’t hurt Sister Anthony Joseph.’

  ‘You won’t. She understands more about life and love than you do.’

  *

  Five hours later Mr and Mrs Blair Crawford sat down to dinner in the dining room of the best hotel they could find. Five hours and ten minutes later they were in the hotel’s best bedroom strewing clothes feverishly across the floor as they made for the bed. Neither of them was prepared for the intensity of their feelings, for the overpowering wildness of their mutual passion. Amazed, exhausted, satisfied, at last they fell asleep.

  It was the last good night’s sleep either of them was to have for quite some time.

  They woke late the next morning. Ferelith lay on the bed and laughed as her naked husband averted his eyes from the body he had so much enjoyed during the night, and covered her with the sheet before sprinting for the bathroom and his dressing gown. Dear God, how sweet and innocent he was. If he had grown a hundred years older in one afternoon in his mother’s opulent home, my God, the night had made her as old as time itself. At last she knew all the secrets. He had invaded her very body. He had conquered her and by conquering he had been conquered. Modestly she hid herself under the sheet and waited while he shaved.

  They went down hand in hand to the dining room. There were two men seated at a table in the corner. They were not eating. They were not speaking. They were just sitting as if they were waiting. They stood up as Ferelith and Blair entered.

  Blair stopped. ‘Oh, no,’ he said, and he blushed a bright red. ‘This is totally unacceptable.’

  Ferelith felt her stomach contract. A second, a lifetime ago, it had felt light and soft and so fulfilled and now, now . . . Such a feeling of foreboding. Oh, God, no. Don’t let it be spoiled.

  ‘Blair?’ she asked tremulously.

  ‘Mr Crawford, Blair, please.’ The older of the two men held out his hand in supplication.

  Blair pushed the hand aside. ‘This is really insupportable . . .’ he began.

  ‘Will you listen, you bloody young fool?’

  Blair stared in embarrassed anger and humiliation at his mother’s lawyer. ‘How dare you follow us, McAndliss. I can’t underst
and. I don’t . . . I mean why would Mother even think I was doing this? We said nothing.’

  He thought back to the luncheon. He had been, he decided, very mature, very civilised. He had kissed his mother goodbye with the usual throwaway lines. ‘I’ll see you soon, darling. I’ll pop home for a weekend.’ He had been as he always was. She could have suspected nothing. But she had. He turned back to the senior man. ‘You will crawl back to my mother and tell her that Ferelith is now my wife and . . .’

  Sinclair McAndliss looked at the young couple. It was not his job to spare them, even to wish that he did not have to do this cruel thing. And there was only one way to do it.

  ‘She’s your sister, laddie,’ said the lawyer baldly. ‘My God, Blair, I told Helena a dozen times, a thousand times to warn you, to alert you.’

  Blair sat down abruptly and clung to the table top as if it was a lifeline. This could not be happening. He could not look at Ferelith. No, no, it was not true. To what depths would his mother dive to get her own way?

  ‘My mother is insane,’ he said. ‘My sister? My father was killed in action in 1914. Ferelith . . .’

  ‘Was born in 1914 in Bombay, India, the daughter of one Niamh Gallagher, spinster, of Cork. Niamh had worked for an army family as a nanny but apart from her employer who was blameless, the only man she met alone was one Major Winterton. The birth certificate of Miss Gallagher says ‘Father Unknown’. Even in death Niamh Gallagher refused to betray her lover, but there was an investigation and it could not have been anyone else. When the pregnancy was discovered your father shot himself, laddie. He was no hero, dying in battle, but a cold-blooded seducer. Why ever did you think your grandfather insisted that you change your name?’

  ‘My name?’ Blair looked at the lawyer. He had no idea what he was talking about.

  ‘You were born Blair Winterton, laddie. Your mother was so ashamed of your father that she had her name and yours legally changed after the war. She said it was for continuity in the estate, a condition of your grandfather’s will, that you could only inherit if you had his name. I’m sorry, Blair, but there is no doubt at all in my mind that your father, Major the Honourable Archie Winterton, and Mrs . . . Miss Gallagher’s father were one and the same man.’

  Mr and Mrs Blair Crawford looked at him in misery and then in horror at one another and then looked away, each embarrassed by the other’s presence.

  And then with horrifying abruptness, Mrs Crawford was violently sick all over the beautiful starched linen cloth on the hotel’s best table. Blair rushed to help her but she threw him off as if she could no longer bear his touch. Last night his hands had inflamed her. Now . . . She turned and ran weeping from the room.

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  First published in Great Britain in 1998 by Little, Brown as Harvest of Courage

  This edition published in Great Britain in 2019 by

  ZAFFRE

  80-81 Wimpole St, London W1G 9RE

  Copyright © Eileen Ramsey 1998, 2019

  The moral right of Eileen Ramsey to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978–1–785–76227–7

  Paperback ISBN: 978–1–785–76228–4

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  Zaffre is an imprint of Bonnier Books UK

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