A Pinch of Salt
Page 34
Ian too left the table and after assuring himself that his father was safely ensconced in the inglenook, he took the book that Mairi had brought him from the Dominie and carried it with pride and care to a seat on the other side of the roaring fire. He was soon deeply involved in the fourteenth century and totally removed from the world around him. Mairi accepted that she would clear the table and wash the dishes; that she would put the oats to soak for the morning’s porridge and that she would fill the stone pigs that warmed the beds. That was woman’s work. She could barely keep her eyes open by the time her jobs were finished.
‘I’m away tae my bed,’ she announced to her father and to her brother but neither heard her. She was not hurt. She did not expect a loving and protracted goodnight ritual. She smiled fondly at her menfolk as if they were her children and took herself off up the oak staircase to her little room under the eaves. She liked her room with its view over the fields towards the Firth of Tay. It was dark and she was tired and cold, but once she was stripped to her vest and knickers she pulled the handmade patchwork quilt from her bed, wrapped it around her shoulders, and sat on the window seat looking out at the night. There were one or two fishing boats on the water. In the moonlight, against the dark sky, they looked like etchings. Mairi waited and waited and there, at last, was the train. It ran like a wheeled jewel box between the fields and the sea. It was going to Dundee, to Edinburgh, to York, maybe even to London itself.
‘I’ll be on you one day, Train,’ she told it. ‘Maybe all the way to London, but at least as far as Dundee. You wait and see.’
First published in Great Britain in 1994 by Warner Books as The Broken Gate
This edition published in Great Britain in 2017 by
ZAFFRE PUBLISHING
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Copyright © Eileen Ramsey 1994. 1997, 2017
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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.
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ISBN: 978-1-785-76223-9
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-785-76224-6
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