Wild Heritage

by Wild Heritage (retail) (epub)

  She was too overcome to speak and they danced on in silence till the music stopped. He was still holding her hand as he watched the happy crowd beginning to depart. ‘The end of a party is always sad,’ he said. I wish it could go on for ever.’

  Marie shook her head. ‘Oh no, if that was the case, we’d have nothing to look forward to, would we?’

  He smiled. ‘That’s very wise. What are you looking forward to?’ he asked quietly.

  She thought for a moment. ‘Painting well. After that I don’t really know.’

  ‘Most young ladies look forward to getting married,’ he said.

  She was flustered! ‘I suppose I do too, but I’ve no one in mind. At the moment painting is more important.’

  He did not relinquish her hand as he said, ‘I hope we don’t lose touch though the ball is over, Cinderella. I don’t intend to let that happen.’ Colour flooded into her face and again she was lost for words. When he gently let her hand go, she hurried off to join Amy, who was saying goodnight to people at the front door.

  It was only afterwards, lying in bed, that she thought of several things she could have said to him in reply but, of course, she hadn’t and she was afraid that she’d not get another chance.

  Next day she rose late and he had gone off to the university by the time she sat with Amy at the breakfast-table, going over the events of the previous evening. Amy was in one of her teasing moods. ‘I think my brother is smitten with you,’ she said.

  Marie tried to appear casual. ‘Which brother?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh don’t be silly! Murray, of course. I saw his adoring look when he was dancing with you. I saw him holding your hand at the end. You mustn’t break his heart. He’s very susceptible is poor Murray. He’s been in love at least three times already.’

  Marie’s heart gave a cruel lurch but she managed to ask, ‘Who with?’ Amy was eating bread and butter and had to mumble through crumbs. ‘Various girls, some nice, some dreadful, but none of them has lasted more than a fortnight. He’s a bit of a flirt, I’m afraid, very susceptible to girls.’

  Marie smiled. ‘I’ll remember that. Who was the plump girl in scarlet he danced with last night, the one with the loud laugh?’

  Amy loved to gossip. ‘Alexandra Adamson. Her father’s so rich it’s obscene and she’s his only child, Alexandra’s simply mad about Murray but he keeps her at arm’s length, though it’s difficult as you must have seen. She throws herself at him. I think she’s sure that her money’ll get him in the end and she might be right. He’s quite keen on money. He’s studying to be a lawyer and most of them are very money-conscious.’

  Marie went on to ask, ‘And who was the dark girl in green plaid? Your father and your other brothers danced with her too. She seemed very dignified.’

  The girl in green had sailed through the party with a poise that suggested nothing in life would ever discomfit her and although she was not pretty, she exuded a strange attraction, an indifference that drew men to her and meant she was never short of dancing partners.

  ‘That,’ said Amy portentously, ‘is our cousin Julia, a very different case from poor Alexandra. We’re all terrified of Julia – even my mother treats her with respect because Julia’s parents are both dead and her only brother was killed in the Indian Mutiny, so she owns a castle in the Highlands and has a vast fortune – Alexandra’s in triplicate I believe. My father is her trustee because she was his brother’s child, but she tells him exactly what to do. We all keep in with her because she might leave her money to us or our children.’

  ‘Why do you think she won’t marry? I thought she was very impressive-looking,’ said Marie, who remembered the cool way the tall girl had circled the floor with Murray. They were the same height and made a striking pair.

  Amy scoffed, ‘My dear girl, her tongue could cut cast iron. She doesn’t suffer fools – or anyone else come to that – gladly and it would take a brave man to ask her to marry him.’

  They didn’t go to Edinburgh to classes that day but stayed in Murrayhill, gossiping, giggling, amusing each other. The froideur that had come between them over the portrait seemed to have disappeared and Amy was going out of her way to be as delightful as possible.

  When the men came home, they spent another delightful evening with Mrs Roxburgh playing the piano and everyone singing. Amy was a skilled performer of comic songs, some of them quite risqué, but Murray had a deep baritone voice that made Marie’s toes curl with desire. When he sang sentimental ballads, he looked at her with his dark eyes and she would have died for him if he’d asked her.

  After the parents retired upstairs, the young people remained in the drawing-room playing cards. While they were sitting out, Murray took Marie’s hand and pulled her gently towards the conservatory. Inside its door, among the tropical foliage and with the smell of damp moss filling her nostrils, she was kissed for the first time.

  ‘I think I love you,’ he told her.

  ‘You think?’ she asked in a faint voice.

  ‘Yes, I really think so. You’re so pretty and such a clever artist. If I was able to propose to a girl, I’d ask you to marry me but I’ve nothing to offer you…’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m not fortune-hunting, Murray.’

  He kissed her again and sighed, ‘I know you’re not but I have to have some decent prospects to put before your father, haven’t I?’

  ‘My, father’s dead,’ she told him.

  Again another kiss. ‘Then perhaps one day you’ll consider marrying? Will you?’

  She did not want to appear too eager but she would have married him there and then if given the chance… ‘Perhaps,’she said. It was an effort to make her voice as light as his.

  Then she slid her arms round his neck and, without artifice or thought of keeping him in suspense, kissed him full on the lips, not one of the brushing little kisses they’d exchanged so far but a full-blooded, enthusiastic kiss that obviously took him by surprise. He clutched her tightly to him and kissed her back.

  ‘We’re ideal for each other,’ he murmured as he sank his face into her hair.

  She had no chance to agree with him because at that moment the pixie face of Amy peered round the corner of the door. ‘Just as I thought, two lovebirds billing and cooing. Come out you silly pair. It’s a good thing the parents have gone to bed because Mama would have a fit if she saw you,’ she said mockingly.

  Murray was short with his sister. ‘Go away, Amy. You’re a little snooper.’

  She laughed, ‘Don’t worry. I won’t tell. But come out before the servants see you because they might not be so discreet.’

  After that she and Marie had a secret that they referred to obliquely. Amy always referred to Murray as ‘the swain’ and often wandered across the Professor’s studio in the middle of a class to say things like, ‘The swain asked me to say he and his friends will be waiting for us when we finish.’

  They met in a recently opened tea parlour where Marie and Murray clasped hands under the table while their friends laughed and gossiped around them. From time to time they managed to snatch a kiss, but the lack of opportunity for this only increased her passion, though he seemed to take the flirtation more lightly.

  Marie went to Murrayhill as often as before but Murray was rarely there and when he was, Mrs Roxburgh contrived to keep them apart by seating him at the far end of the table Or sending him off on some errand that took him out of the house for hours.

  Amy told Marie that the time for his examinations was coming round and his mother was anxious that he was not diverted from his work. For evening after evening he was closeted in his room and she hardly saw him at all.

  When summer came, Murray went to France with a group of friends. He did not write to her and Marie spent the fine days at Camptounfoot fretting. When classes began again in September, Amy appeared with a very glum face.

  ‘There’s been bad news about Murray,’ she whispered to Marie when she came into the studio.

  ‘What’s
happened to him? He isn’t hurt or ill, is he?’ she asked anxiously.

  ‘Oh, no, nothing like that. The silly fellow has failed his exams. He’ll have to do them all again next year. Mother and father are furious. They say he didn’t work hard enough.’

  Marie pretended to take this news philosophically but she was desperately disappointed, for this meant that another year would have to go by before Murray was in a position really to ask her to marry him.

  Her own prospects, however, seemed to be brightening as his waned. Professor Abernethy was loud in his praise of her copies of the Dutch flower paintings.

  ‘This is wonderful. You’ve found your métier. You could sell these. I think we should have an exhibition next spring and display your work. It’s time my school had a show and you’ll be a star to draw the crowds,’ he enthused.

  He brought his friends to look at Marie’s paintings and they were equally complimentary, calling her a ‘rare talent’ while she blushed under their praise.

  One society painter, who swept around Edinburgh in a long black cloak like a swashbuckler, put his hand on her arm when he’d looked at her work and said, ‘You’re remarkably good fora woman. But let me give you a piece of advice, my dear. When you sign your work, don’t write Marie Benjamin.’

  She looked at him in surprise and asked, ‘Should I use another name?’

  He smiled superciliously. ‘Of course not. What I mean is, don’t use the name Marie. Sign your work by your initial only… M. Benjamin. Then it’s more likely to sell.’

  At first she did not understand and he had to explain. ‘Ifyou only use an initial, the buyers and the critics won’t know you’re a woman, my dear. Pictures by women don’t sell, I’m afraid.’

  ‘But that’s dreadful. It’s unfair,’ she protested.

  The painter shrugged. ‘So it may be, but it’s a fact of life. If you want to sell, use your initial. If it doesn’t matter, stand by your principles by all means…’

  Ruefully she painted out Marie on the canvases she had already completed and signed herself as M. Benjamin. She wanted to sell.

  Chapter Twelve

  With Toby sitting beside her, Kitty perched on the top step of Grandma Kennedy’s wagon.

  She and the dog were good friends now but it had taken over a year to win him round, for suspicion of strangers was part of his nature. She slid an arm round his neck and felt his spiky hair against her skin as she stared out over a vast landscape of rolling hills that awed her by their emptiness.

  They were on the way to Alston, high on the Cumberland moors, and the landscape was forbidding, spread out for mile upon mile of bare windswept hills covered with reeds and cotton grass. Not a house, not a tree, not a living soul could be seen apart from the slowly creeping wagons of the cavalcade.

  Kitty’s passion for travelling, for keeping on the move, which had made her so unsettled at Falconwood was fired by the variety of places she had seen since she joined the boxing show. They trekked the roads from the hop fields of Kent to the dour grimness of Lancashire mill towns, avoiding big cities apart from seaports and concentrating on smaller towns where people were avid for entertainment.

  She loved setting up the booth in a new place, but even more she loved dismantling it and setting out for another destination. Now she was wondering about Alston. What would it be like; how would the people react to the show?

  They were still a long way from their destination when they stopped for the night in a hollow between two hills. Tomorrow they’d wend their way on up, up, up till they reached the town where they’d be one of the attractions of the annual fair.

  Grandma Kennedy came hurrying over. She never seemed to move at normal walking pace but scuttled like a crab.

  ‘It’s going to blow a gale tonight. We’ll have to tie the wagons down in case they get blown over,’ she shouted in the teeth of a rising wind.

  Kitty grinned. She enjoyed rough weather and to be blown over would only be another experience to add to all the ones she’d had in the past eventful year. She joined the men throwing thick ropes over the roofs of the caravans and securing them to the ground with big U-shaped metal pegs that were driven in with a huge wooden mallet wielded by Joe. The women’s job was to grab the ends of the ropes when they came snaking over the roofs and hold them down till they were securely pegged. When everything was finished, Bill the busker, who was supervising the operation, wiped his brow and stared at the leaden sky as he said, ‘All right, blow all you like now. We’re safe enough.’

  As she passed by, Grandma patted Kitty on the back, saying, ‘Well done, Kate. Come on in now, it’s suppertime. We’d all better get bedded down before this storm starts.’

  As usual they were sharing their supper with Grandma’s sister Sophia, the big woman who kept the fortune-telling mynah. Tall and stately, copper-skinned and craggy-faced, she bore no physical resemblance to little Grandma and Kitty found it difficult to believe that they were sisters but they assured her they were, though by different fathers.

  ‘It’s the mother who counts, not the father,’ said Grandma solemnly and Sophia nodded her great head in agreement.

  ‘You’re right. It’s the women who count. It’s the women who carry on the family. It’s the women who rear the children. It’s the women who hold things together.’

  The sisters were fond of each other and when suppertime came, Sophia always arrived at Grandma’s wagon with her contribution to the meal in a wicker basket covered with a pristine white cloth. On the night of the high wind she brought a meat pie, three red apples, a spherical yellow cheese like a cricket ball and a black bottle of wine. As a finishing touch she fished out three tightly furled pink roses and stuck them in a little glass jar in the middle of the table. She must have picked them many miles back, for the travellers had passed no gardens or rose bushes for a long, long way.

  When everything was laid out, the table looked like a picture and Kitty gazed at it with admiration. Everything in the wagon was always attractive, clean and tidy, luxurious in fact, although the space was cramped. The contrast between the lives of the travelling folk and those of the farm-workers she had lived with at Falconwood, and her grandmother’s bothy, was very marked. Some farm wives kept clean and tidy houses but they had no money to spare for inessentials like pretty china and the embroidered and tasselled cushions that covered the bed and the bench beneath the window where Kitty slept at night.

  She had also discovered that the travelling people were a good deal more decorous in their behaviour than farm folk. With them she never heard the foul language that she had been accustomed to on the farm, where men did not bridle their tongues in the presence of women or children. Nor did she hear any of the earthy and crude jokes that both men and women at Falconwood bandied about among themselves. Grandma hated what she called ‘vulgarities’. Her language was forthright and simple – she always called a spade a spade – but it was never smutty. Kitty felt far safer with the travelling folk than she had ever felt at Falconwood.

  Grandma’s first name was Beattie and she had brought Sophia up from childhood because their mother died when the younger sister was six years old. Their mother owned the entourage and on her death, the business was passed down to the eldest daughter, Grandma.

  Kitty sat on the bench with her chin on her hand and asked questions. ‘Did you both get married?’ she wanted to know. ‘I know Bill’s your son, Grandma, but what about Sophia?’

  Grandma nodded. ‘Oh aye, we got married. I married our star boxer, the Tornado he was called. He was a bonny man! You and I nearly fell out over him, didn’t we, Sophy?’

  ‘But he liked you best, Beattie. I married his brother, the big idiot,’ said Sophia.

  Grandma stood up and began tidying the debris on the table. ‘It’s all past now. They’re both dead. And we’re still here.’

  ‘So we are,’ agreed Sophia. ‘And so’s our sons, your Bill and my Henry.’

  She looked at Kitty and said, ‘Henry’s in the Na
vy. He’s too smart to go on the road is my Henry.’

  Grandma bridled at this. ‘It’s a good job some lads stay on the road or where would we be? We couldn’t manage without Bill,’ she told her sister who hurriedly agreed. It was obvious that no matter how formidable Sophia appeared outside, the tiny sister ruled over her.

  When their meal was finished, Kitty took the dishes outside to wash in a little burn that ran past their camping site and the gathering force of the storm surprised her, for the wind was tearing at her hair and making her skirt swirl around her legs. It was already difficult to walk against it, so she did not take long over her task and was back with the two women very quickly. She was happy in their company, they amused her with their stories, and she never once considered leaving them.

  The only shadow in her life came when something made her remember her mother. She wondered if the baby had been born safely, but it was impossible to find out because she was afraid to let anyone in Camptounfoot know where she was in case the policeman was looking for her.

  Next morning the wind had blown itself out and Kitty sat on the driving box of the wagon beside Bill as they drove into Alston.

  ‘Do you think there’ll be a big crowd tonight?’ she asked.

  He nodded. ‘It’s always good here. Everyone turns out for the fair. There’s not much else to do on the top of these hills. They’re nice folk though, the old-fashioned kind.’

  She nodded. She had been with the show in similar towns where the railway had not yet penetrated and where the people were simple and unaffected, content with the way of life that their forefathers had led, not hankering after cities or foreign parts. It was always a pleasure to put on a big act for them, to draw howls and screams from the spectators.

  Their routine was easy. When Kitty, pretending to be a girl from the crowd, knocked down Joe, Grandma jumped in to avenge him. Sometimes she won and sometimes victory went to Kitty.

  In order to get away with it, they had to be sure no one saw the red-haired girl arriving with the show wagons, so when they were still quite a way from the town she jumped down from her seat beside Bill and stood by the roadside watching the cavalcade disappear towards their campsite. She would meet up with them after the show, on the road out of the town as they left.