Later Alec told his tale and the drover listened with sympathy. He was saddened by the wreckage of the young man’s hopes to establish himself in the prosperous business of Master Angus Leslie in the City of London, but applauded his action in killing my Lord Lennox’s evil little pimp.
‘It grieves me above all,’ Alec told him, ‘that none now knows if I be alive or dead. Indeed, if they come to hear of my escape from Lennox’s men in St Andrews, or maybe conjecture it, for they will know only that I disappeared from thence, they must believe that the hunt ended in my death and an unmarked grave.’
‘Could ye send no message since that time?’ the drover asked gravely.
Alec then gave him an account of his wanderings, his captivity at Eilan Donan, his escape from there and the reasons for his appearance that day in Swaledale. When he had finished there was a long silence between the two that neither seemed inclined to break.
They were sitting a little apart from the other drovers who had gathered round a large fire to eat their supper and were now preparing to wrap themselves in their cloaks or plaids and stretch themselves on the ground, with their saddles for pillows. Alec watched them, envious in the fresh turmoil of his mind, of the simplicity and certainty of their existence. He said something of this to the drover.
‘Not so certain,’ the other replied. ‘But simple enough, i’ faith. There be hazards for us, as for all men.’
‘But ye see your purpose plain, not as for me in a mishmash of plans, proposals, risks, doubts and fears!’
‘Look’ee,’ the drover said, after considering this outburst. ‘We take these beasts to market at Jedburgh, then disperse, a few to nearby homes, most back to find more work of the kind. But I go on to Leith this time for a visit to my sister married there these ten years. At Leith—’
‘Where Captain Smithson berthed and I left his brig Sunflower.’
‘Where my sister’s man works on the quayside and knows the shipping—’
‘And may tell if Sunflower still plies with sea-coal to London and if Captain Smithson be still in command of her!’
‘Aye,’ said the drover, looking away at the fire where his companions were now comfortably settled. He yawned and began to make his own arrangements for sleep.
‘If I were to write a message,’ said Alec, betraying himself against his usual habit, but at once remembering he had in his account of his time in London, already done so. ‘If—’
‘I canna read,’ said the drover, smiling, ‘also I doubt if thou hast the wherewithal to write at this time. So speak thy message, lad. I’ll not forget it.’
“Tis just that Jock Bridie lives, is well would find him a new life at sea from Bristol or the Channel ports.’
‘Jock Bridie,’ repeated the drover. ‘To Captain Smithson of the brig Sunflower.’
Alec wondered if he could also mention Captain Henderson of The Queen of Denmark, who had taken him to Sunflower in the Pool of London on the day of his catastrophe. But there was no certainty of the latter calling at Leith. Perhaps the goodness of God, who had guided him to the drover’s camp, would see to it that Captain Smithson handed on the message to Henderson if they met in London. In that case Francis and Master Leslie would come to know of his survival. But he must leave these things to the will of God. He must not burden the good drover with more names than he could reasonably carry.
‘Aye, friend,’ he said. ‘Smithson of the brig Sunflower, from his former crew, Jock Bridie, that sailed with him from London to Leith in the late summer of last year. Whether the message be delivered or no I am much beholden to thee for thy goodness and patience in hearing my grievous story.’
The drover, somewhat confused by the formality of Alec’s speech, merely grunted in reply and turning away from him settled himself to sleep. But Alec stayed for a long time staring at the fire as the logs slowly broke and fell apart, the sparks grew less and the ashes faded.
In the morning the whole party rose early and the sun had barely cleared the mist the drover had foreseen than they were on their way with shouts and whistles, the bullocks lowing, dogs barking and the strong shaggy ponies, not yet shorn of their winter coats, cantering from side to side to round up the stragglers.
Alec watched until the herd disappeared over the next hill, then set out southwards along the track up which the drovers had come. Leaving the Swale behind, he came presently to Wensleydale and the village of Witton, where he found an inn, the Cow and Calf and there stopped for food.
Chapter Six
Alec had intended simply to have a meal at the inn before continuing his journey south. The pretty, timbered, whitewashed cottage from which the inn sign swung on a short arm above the door was clearly open, though the hour was still early. A man was sweeping the flagstone path that led into the narrow lane across a little stretch of grass. He looked up as Alec approached.
‘I have been with the drovers,’ Alec said, modifying, his Scottish accent, as he had been wont to do in London, to suit English ears. ‘I travel south. I would rest and eat if so be ye can supply me.’
‘Go you in,’ the man said with a sour look. ‘I bain’t t’ landlord. You mun ask it of Mistress Sugden hersel’.’
Alec knocked at the half-open door, rather afraid he might meet an even colder reception within. But a gentle voice said, ‘Enter,’ and he found himself in a small dark room, lit by only one tiny window, with a stone-flagged floor, a bench or two and a trestle table running the length of the wall opposite the door.
Mistress Sugden was plump, red-faced and in her middle age, Alec thought. She looked as if she was meant to lead a happy, carefree life but had met with some recent shock or setback that had perplexed and grieved her, drawing lines about her mouth and painting deep shadows under her eyes that suited ill with the roundness of her face and the generous curves of her figure.
He soon found that he was right in these conjectures. Mistress Sugden found him bread and some slices of cold pork and a tankard of mild ale. As she laid these things before him she apologised for the shortcomings of the meal and its service.
‘’Tis not what we were accustomed to serve,’ she explained, ‘My husband built up our custom with the good victuals we gave until our Cow and Calf was the best-known inn to travellers from Wensley to Ripon. In the old days, you must know, there was a-many travellers through Witton going to the old abbey of Jervaulx that be now in ruins and the stones of it builded into houses for great folk or taken to prop up the dwellings of the villagers.’
‘Aye,’ Alec said. ‘I mind me well of such a fate the great old religious houses have suffered.’
He was remembering St Andrews and its fallen cathedral, that constant landmark of his earlier youth.
‘But their day was over,’ he went on and smiled, finding himself repeating his fanatical father’s perpetual assertion, though not with the latter’s extravagant fulminations.
‘Happen it were,’ Mistress Sugden said, ‘but a blasphemy to destroy God’s house and I care not who hears me say so. My goodman’s grandfather served travellers to Jervaulx and poor folk who sought succour there. And he kept our good name until he were taken from us—’
She turned away to hide the sudden uprush of her grief.
With no wish to pry Alec said, ‘Then he who sweeps without is—’ He hesitated and continued, ‘He did say he was not the landlord and I must go within—’
‘Eat thy fill and be on thy way,’ said Mistress Sugden, with a stony face. She turned and went out through the door behind the trestle table, leaving Alec, somewhat abashed, to continue his meal in solitude.
But not for long. The door through which Mistress Sugden had gone opened again and a girl came in, carrying some apples in a bowl. She was plump like her mother, but with a smooth face and a clear complexion, the innocent, eyes of youth and a generous mouth held firm by shyness and decorum, but trembling now and then into a half smile.
The skins of the apples were brown and shrunk but in no way diseased. Alec
looked at them with surprise. He had not seen fruit of any kind since the autumn of the year before and did not look to see any so early as June.
Seeing his surprise the girl said, ‘We keep them in dry straw in a barrel. They be not handsome but they taste clean and sweet.’
‘Indeed they do,’ Alec said gratefully, biting a piece off one and swallowing it, shrivelled skin and all. The girl laughed, then looked behind her with a hand to her mouth.
‘My moother—’ she began and stopped.
Alec, with the unfinished apple in his hand, rose to his feet, picked up and emptied his tankard and turned to the girl.
‘I am not wanted here,’ he said gently. ‘But no matter. Tell me what I owe and I will pay thee and be on my way.’
Tears rose in the girl’s eyes.
‘My moother be in trouble,’ she said simply, with great dignity, ‘for my faither were lost on t’ hills in t’ snow o’ this winter, looking for his sheep that were lost, too. We scarce know where to turn or how to live since—’
She would have left him then but he laid a hand on her arm to keep her.
‘Is there ought I can do to help?’ he asked, ‘Beyond paying for my breakfast?’
Her natural good humour broke through her troubled feelings.
‘Nowt save take thy dinner here as well,’ she said, giving him her ready smile, that warmed his heart even more than her words.
He agreed to that and went out into the sunshine to find the man he had first seen and question him about his position at the Cow and Calf.
This man, he found, was the late Master Sugden’s brother, a younger brother, by a year only. He had been employed chiefly on the smallholding that went with the inn, but since his brother’s tragic death in the snow he had conceived the idea that the inn should have gone to him together with the farm and not to the widow, who claimed both for herself as being the true successor.
‘lookee,’ the man said, passionately, ‘happen her brat had been a boy I’d ’ave said nowt agin it. Sugdens ’ave bin ’ere four generations an more. But now—Like enough she’ll marry again, she’s nobbut thirty and six year. A new name ower t’ Cow and Calf! Maybe she’ll breed a boy wi’ that name! A right shame that’ll be—’
‘But there is as yet no danger that I see,’ Alec said to soothe him.
‘An’ who the devil might you be, stranger, to see owt? Tha’s not bin in t’ house above a couple hours.’
‘Ay, so,’ Alec answered. ‘So ye dispute her claim and she keeps ye from the inn, maybe, and who works the farm? Or mayhap there is no farm left since Master Sugden is no longer here to command thy help.’
‘I’ll take no orders from her,’ said the brother sulkily. But he showed his unease by his lack of resentment at Alec’s plain speaking. It was evident that his interest in the farm lay far above his obstinate claim to the inn. Presently he said, ‘Our two hands left us the day after the funeral. They’d not work for any woman, they said. Nor any man that couldna rule a woman. Meaning me, see’st? Wi’ hay standing uncut and no means to bring it in besides, for the pony went too in t’ snow.’
Alec regarded the man with impatience for his poor spirit and complaining, but he pitied Mistress Sugden and more still her daughter, who was as pretty as the mother must have been some twenty years before.
‘I’ll cut your hay for ye,’ he said, ‘if so be there is no more than a man can scythe in a couple o’ days work.’
Sugden was astonished, even suspicious. But the young man looking down at him from his great height with such a sarcastic gleam in his blue eyes, repeated his offer, evidently sincere. It was not a chance to miss.
‘Go thou to Mistress Sugden,’ he said. ‘Tell her thou hast a mind to work on t’ farm. Tell her ah’ll take thee if she hath a mind to it.’
By the end of that day Alec, with stiffening arms and back, was astonished at the impulse that had placed him in his present position. He straightened up, leaning on his scythe, looking at the area of fallen hay on the one side and the acre or more of standing grass on the other. Farm work of the basest, most monotonous kind, when he meant to find the sea again in time for a whole summer’s fishing. What sort of feeble challenge had it been to fasten him to this task?
He did not know. Later he decided it had been the will of God leading him directly towards his future. But at the time he thought it must be the simple beauty of this place, this hamlet, this lush fertile valley after all the harsh scenes he had lived among these last perilous months. Though his body had recovered since his escape from captivity his spirit was not fully healed. Perhaps he was meant to pause here in his wanderings to attempt a cure. Not for one instant did he follow his questioning to its source in the tale young Polly Sugden had told him, or to his pity for her mother’s plight. Certainly it never entered his head to imagine that Polly herself had influenced his choice.
Shaking the sweat from his eyes he gripped the scythe again and bent to the work, determined to finish the row he was engaged upon before the now sinking sun reached the line of the distant hills.
Alec’s example before long produced two shame-faced and needy men to help in the hay harvest. They were the Sugdens’ former hired hands who came in fear, for they had been refused at other farms. But they were treated kindly. Master Sugden, still with a view to ownership, received them calmly, sent them off to join Alec and left the latter’s example, more particularly his exceptional physique, to spur their efforts.
So the young Scot stayed, well pleased with the hardworking simple folk at Witton, who had rough tongues and to him a strange-sounding dialect, but were honest, good-natured and slow to take offence, though when roused formidable enough. Mistress Sugden fed him well, Master Sugden was as apt to ask his advice on animal matters as to give it and Polly Sugden soon roused in him a genuine, comfortable affection very far from passion, so that her mother’s early misgivings on her behalf soon abated. Especially as the gossip in the neighbourhood suggested that young Jock Bridie, who had wasted no time in finding himself a nag for his personal use, spent his free days, when he claimed any, riding into Ripon and it was anybody’s guess with what purpose, for he bought no goods there that anyone could see but was always the poorer on his return. Which gossip made the village matrons nod wisely and laugh indulgently, while Polly, whose sensible young head had kept her so far from any false step, began to indulge in romantic fancies, the wilder and more enjoyable since Alec gave them no substance in reality.
But in spite of his satisfaction with his present life the young man became aware before June was out that things were no better in the dispute for ownership at the Cow and Calf. Mistress Sugden’s lined face grew more haggard, she was more often closeted with her brother-in-law for long periods and came from these conferences with the marks of tears on her cheeks. Polly, too, seemed anxious, confused, unhappy. Finding the girl alone one day in the small dairy, weeping openly, Alec put a sympathetic arm about her and demanded to know the reason.
Polly was so overcome by his action that she cried all the harder, but at last, having relieved her feelings, she drew away from him and sobbed out, ‘Uncle would take t’ farm often us and moother says she’d die rather and Ben Flinders is after me but I’d die afore I’d take him, the sly cur!’
‘Who is this Ben Flinders?’ Alex asked. He had heard the other causes of complaint many times already, but no mention had ever been made of Polly’s suitor.
‘Over to Wensley,’ the girl answered. ‘His faither had a-many sheep on t’ hills and would take our farm an he could. Moother could keep the old Cow if she could marry me to Ben. Then uncle’s nose ud be out o’ joint and serve him right. But I’ll not have Ben. I’ll die first, the sneaky villain.’
There seemed to be no answer to this, so Alec left the girl to her cream-skimming. But he contrived to find Mistress Sugden alone one hot afternoon, sitting in the shade of her mulberry tree stripping dried lavender from the stalks to put in little bags for her linen. He lowered himself to the
grass beside her and after making a few complimentary remarks upon her many skills and those of her daughter, the flood gates of confidence opened and the good-wife poured out her problems.
The gist of it was much as Polly had described. Master Sugden considered himself his brother’s successor. He had always worked on this, the family farm, his sister-in-law, being a woman, could not conduct the business of the farm, nor for that matter the inn. If Polly had been a boy it would have been different.
‘I lost my boys,’ the poor woman said in a voice of desperation. ‘One older than Poll, one younger. But he’d have wanted it regardless. If only—’
‘If only Polly—’ Alec prompted.
Mistress Sugden said sharply, ‘Polly? What hath my Poll said to ’ee? Happen she’ll give way to sense, happen she willna. But tell it to strangers—I’
‘I’m no stranger in thy house now, mistress,’ Alec said stoutly. ‘Mistress Polly was much distressed. I came upon her in the dairy. It was an impulse—’
‘You make impulses easy, lad,’ Mistress Sugden said with a wan smile. ‘I would my brother had stayed with us. But my father’s land was taken, he had no means to start afresh.’
‘Taken?’
‘Enclosed. They drive us out on a pretext. There’s a-many can no longer support themselves. So like my brother, Will, they venture to these settlements across the ocean.’
Her words struck Alec with the force of a blow, of a blinding light, of a revelation. He could not speak for a few seconds, then he said in a croaking voice that made Mistress Sugden stare at him, ‘Where be he now then, mistress?’
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