Lark Returning

by Lark Returning (retail) (epub)

  On the night of the 1815 harvest kirn Jane and Adam Cannon stayed at home. They heard the sounds of revelry coming from the direction of the big barn and it awoke her memories of other harvest celebrations. Her memories of making love with Blaize were vivid and painful but she deliberately put them out of her mind, bustling about looking after the baby and trying to cheer her dispirited father.

  It was as if he could divine her secret thoughts for he suddenly asked, ‘When he comes, what’ll you do?’ They both knew who he was talking about.

  She stared out of the window at the meadow where they had danced together – bathed now, as then, in silvery moonlight.

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps we’ll settle down and live near here.’

  Adam shook his head. ‘You wouldn’t go back to France with him because of me, would you? But lassie, I could stay on my own. I wouldn’t be lonely.’

  ‘Don’t you worry, I won’t leave you. We’ll think of something else,’ she told him, slipping an affectionate arm round his shoulders.

  * * *

  The harvest celebrations had an unexpected ending. It was a warm night and after the feasting and the singing were finished, young Glendinning and a group of other men, all drunk, went down to the river to bathe in the salmon cauld. They splashed about naked and shouting in the light of the moon but when they climbed back on the bank again, one of their number was missing. Glendinning’s son and heir had disappeared in his own stretch of river, a stretch known for its sullen and dangerous currents. His body was not found for more than a week but in the end it was washed up at Berwick and carried back home to Charterhall on a farm cart.

  Tongues wagged furiously in the district and everyone was talking about how Jane Cannon had foreseen the death of young Glendinning. As the tale went from mouth to mouth, it was embroidered and embellished until everyone believed that she had not only forecast a violent end for the young man but had seen him sinking down through black water.

  ‘She’s got the sight, that lassie, oh aye, she’s got the sight. It’s better not to cross her,’ said the chatterers, drawing back as the girl passed by.

  When Adam Cannon went into Melrose in the middle of September to make inquiries about jobs that were likely to become vacant the following year, he heard the first news of the battle of Waterloo which had taken place on 18 June.

  An old man in the King’s Arms told him, ‘Thon deevil Boney escaped from Elba and started all the fighting up again. But our chaps have beaten the hell out of him at a place called Waterloo. The newspapers say the war’s really over this time. Boney’s given himself up to our sailors and they’re going to shoot him.’

  From his shepherd brother-in-law, a less bellicose informant, he heard more details of Waterloo. ‘Do you mind thon Colonel Berton, the old chap with the grey hair who was the head of the prisoners here? Well, folk are saying he was killed at Waterloo fighting for Bonaparte again. Poor old soul, he should have given up making war at his age. When he left here he didn’t look strong enough to get to Berwick.’

  Adam took this news home to Jane and when she heard it, a terrible chill spread from her heart throughout her entire body.

  ‘Oh, not the colonel, the kind old colonel Blaize admired so much! How could he be killed in battle! What happened? How did Bonaparte get out of Elba?’ she asked her father.

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. That’s all they said in Melrose. The newspapers said that Napoleon’s been on the loose since March and when he landed in France all his old soldiers rallied to him again. He must be quite a man, that Bonaparte, for men to follow him that way.’

  The French had been fighting since March! Blaize sent her fifty pounds at the beginning of that month – oh, surely he had not rejoined his Emperor? But she remembered only too well how he admired Bonaparte, how reverently he talked of him as if the man were a sort of god. He respected the Emperor more than any other man alive and she knew that if Blaize was asked to rejoin the Imperial army, he would do it.

  She could hardly force herself to ask the next question, but she had to know. ‘Did they mention anybody else from Melrose being killed at Waterloo?’

  But her father, giving her an understanding look, shook his head. ‘Don’t worry, Jane, they only talked about old Colonel Berton. That’s all they knew about. If there was anyone else we know who was killed, they’d have heard, I don’t doubt it.’ Neither of them mentioned Blaize’s name.

  Then another thought struck her. ‘What would happen to the men who survived the battle? Would they be taken prisoner again?’ she asked.

  Her father shook his head. ‘I don’t think our side would bother. No, they say France is well and truly beaten this time so they’d just let them go home. If they do shoot Boney there’ll be nobody to make them want to fight any more and even those Frenchmen need a leader.’

  The news reassured her in a way. If Blaize had gone off to fight, his plans for return would have been set back. That’s why he’d missed the haymaking season but she’d wait for him. She’d wait for ever if necessary…

  * * *

  In the years that followed the Napoleonic Wars, agriculture and the farming people were to go through a period of great hardship. Not only were wages low but expenses were high and families had to choose between putting clothes on their children’s backs and shoes on their feet, or feeding them. As for sending them to school, few labouring families could afford the handful of coppers a week that it cost to have a child taught to read and write in one of the little village schoolrooms. Yet as a class they had a deep respect for learning – it was the only way for the cleverest among them to escape the backbreaking toil that was their daily lot. The dream of any mother or father with a clever son was to be able to send him to university and then into the church. In fact many clever boys from poor homes in Scotland did fulfil this dream but it took hard work, dedication and much privation, not only for the young men but for all the rest of their families as well, before they could do so.

  Like their social superiors, however, most labourers’ families thought that educating girls was a waste of time and money. A girl was destined to marry and even after marriage she was regarded as little more than a working animal, hardly superior to the beasts of the field.

  Strong or feeble, clever or simple, they went to work by the age of twelve and when they lifted their heads up from their toil and watched their well-born sisters walking in flower-filled gardens or riding by in carriages with silken parasols over their heads, they regarded them with a lack of envy, a sense of wonder and feeling of apartness like African natives watching white missionaries.

  It was ill luck that Adam Cannon had to go looking for a new place at such a time of depression. His friends and fellow tenant farmers, the few who were left, could not afford to offer him work. They needed younger men with big families to occupy their farm cottages. The more hands that came out of one house the better. Old Adam with his unmarried daughter and her baby was not a good bargain, and it made him feel ashamed to have to ask for help. But it was necessary to find a place before the March hiring fair in Earlston. His proud soul revolted at the idea of having to stand like an animal in a market waiting to be picked out by some man with money.

  But no job came. Jock Hepburn came to the abbey house to repeat his request that Jane should marry him. He pressed his suit with a little gentle blackmail, giving her the reminder that he would be able to offer her and her father a home, for he still had his job and his cottage with Glendinning.

  Jane’s mobile face showed that she appreciated this point. She was worried about her father, who was daily slipping into more profound despair as his efforts to find work failed.

  When Jock left, however, Adam roughly told her not to turn back on the road she had set herself. ‘If you don’t love Jock, don’t marry him for my sake. If you believe your man will come back, trust him and wait.’

  He clinched his argument with a lie. ‘Anyway, I’ve had an offer of a place at Earlston, so we don’t need
his help.’

  So Jane turned Jock down, telling him once again how much she respected him but that there was no love in her heart for him, not the love she knew she was capable of feeling. ‘We’ll always be friends, but I’d like to see you married to some woman who’ll love you for yourself, not just because you gave her a roof over her head,’ she said sadly.

  The job and house in Earlston did not materialize, of course, and Adam’s spirits grew lower and lower. He was obsessed with the fear of having to turn to the parish for help – for he knew how grudgingly charity was handed out to paupers. He tortured himself with the thought that without him round her neck, Jane would have her fifty pounds from Blaize all to herself, as well as a better chance of a job. She could hire herself out as a housemaid perhaps, and then she wouldn’t have to labour in the fields. Big Agnes, or one of the other farm women, would take in her baby to foster.

  Besides, if Jane was alone and Blaize came back, she would be able to go off with him to a better life without worrying about her father.

  He took to wandering the fields and woods alone, saying goodbye to the hidden corners he’d known since boyhood. Every time he forded the river it murmured seductively to him and he stood in it with the foaming spume bubbling round his boots, wondering what young Glendinning felt when the Tweed water closed over his head for the last time. It wouldn’t be a bad death.

  Then he looked up, dizzied from his contemplation of the rushing current, and saw the majestic beech trees standing sentinel along the stark red riverbanks that rose up steep like guardian walls. He watched the shy herons stalking in the shallows, stilt legged and beady eyed as they scanned the pools for unsuspecting fish. He turned his white head to follow the flight of a skein of ducks and smiled at the sound of their flapping wings. He was drinking in every sight and sound of a scene which had always delighted him.

  One night when the river was rushing down blood red in its first autumn flood, he told Jane he was going to search for firewood.

  ‘Don’t worry. I might come home the long way round. Go to bed if I’m not back.’

  When he reached the riverbank the sound of the rushing torrent, wrenching and tearing wildly at the banks, delighted him because he knew that once in, there would be no chance of fighting for his life or swimming to safety. Smiling as simply and innocently as a child, he slipped off the bank into the cold water. His beloved river treated him kindly. It did not carry his body down to Berwick to be examined by curious strangers but washed him up only a mile from home, and left him floating, arms outspread, in a side eddy, pinned back from the main stream by a large tree branch.

  In the morning when he did not emerge from his tiny bed closet, Jane went looking for him. Distraught, she alerted the other labourers and they formed a search party. It was Jock Hepburn who found him floating gently in the river.

  * * *

  The burying place of the Cannons was marked by a lopsided, lichen-covered stone with a curly-haired, trumpet-blowing angel carved on it. No names were decipherable now, for the inscriptions had all worn away long ago and the stone had sunk gently into the earth till it was half covered with mossy earth so that the angel looked as if she were rising resurrected out of the ground.

  When Jane’s father was buried beside his wife, her predominant feeling was gratitude that he never had to face the agony of leaving the abbey house. Mr Swanston, the minister from Earlston who conducted the ceremony, had agreed to bury Adam in consecrated ground because everyone told him that the old man must have slipped and fallen into the river in the darkness. It was an accident, they all said, Adam Cannon was far too sensible a man to even consider suicide.

  Only Jane, who had witnessed her father’s growing depression, knew the truth, but she kept her own counsel.

  At the end of the burial ceremony she stopped the minister on his way back to his gig and asked him, ‘Mr Swanston, if I bring my baby to your church will you christen her for me?’

  He was a thin, pinched man with red-rimmed eyes and a nose that permanently dripped. His sermons were long and hectoring and he tended to take himself very seriously indeed. Now he looked on the girl with the child held close to her heart, disfavour and disapproval in his eyes.

  ‘That child’s a bastard, isn’t it?’ he asked.

  Shaken, she nodded. ‘I suppose she is – legally. Her father and I aren’t married. He’s married already, you see.’

  Swanston reeled in shock. ‘How could you tell me that? You’re a fornicator, an adulterer! And you ask me to christen the child of your unholy union? Have some sense, girl. I wouldn’t allow a child like that in God’s house.’

  She stepped back with a look of disbelief on her face. The Cannons had perhaps not been as fervent in their church attendance as some of the farm servants who would attend services three times on Sundays, but they were a God-fearing, good-living family and it had never occurred to her that the minister would refuse to christen Aylie. Without a word, she turned on her heel and walked away from him, hating his pious face and his sanctimonious voice. ‘I’ll never go into his church again,’ she swore to herself.

  In mid March, Jane with Aylie in her arms walked the three miles along the twisting road to Earlston where the hiring fair was held. She left the abbey house early in the morning when a cruel wind was howling down from the hills with cutting rain in its breath, and she shivered in misery each time she turned a corner into open ground and its teeth bit into her.

  She wore her bondager costume because it was necessary to show prospective employers the sort of job she was able to do and also because she knew that the outfit made her look strong and capable. Her grey and yellow striped overskirt stuck out over layers of stiffly starched petticoats – and a thick flannel one as well. The big straw hat had been newly varnished with black japanning and in the brim she tucked a few early daffodils, a brave gesture against the bitter weather. A pink flowered headscarf tied the hat down against the strong wind and it matched her print blouse which showed beneath her father’s old black jacket. On top of all she wore a tightly wound black woollen shawl into which she wrapped her pink-cheeked baby.

  Aylie was her greatest pride, for the child was always happy, smiling and eager for an outing. Today, in spite of the cold, she stared out from her cosy nest, laughing in delight each time they passed some lambs clustered round their mothers or startled a rabbit or a gloriously gleaming pheasant from under the bare-branched hedgerows.

  It was still only seven o’clock and half dark when Jane took up her stance in the cobbled square of the town. Behind her loomed the red sandstone bulk of the recently built Corn Exchange where crowds of farmers were already gathering. Through the open door of the Red Lion Inn next door, sounds of shouting and revelry could be heard, for the drinking had begun before dawn.

  Jane stationed herself on a corner and the wind whipped round her legs as she stood trying to ignore the curious eyes that were turned in her direction. Though she did not know everyone there, they all knew her or at least had heard of her… ‘That’s Adam Cannon’s lassie… the one wi’ the Frenchman’s bairn.’

  Heads were shaken and tongues were clicked in disapproval or in dismay at the death of her father, for Adam had been a well-respected man and his death had shocked the community. How could he slip into the river like that, they asked each other? He knew the river well because he’d lived beside it all his life. He was not a drinker so there was no excuse that he had lost his footing while under the influence. What a terrible pity! It was decent of the minister to give him a Christian burial.

  By eight o’clock there was a dense crowd in the square. Shepherds stood in groups, each man holding his horn-handled crook, the symbol of his trade. Carters brandished whips with long cruel thongs; grooms carried riding crops; ploughmen and hinds had wisps of straw in their hats or carried pitchforks. Some of the people seeking work were bent and grey headed while others were little more than children. Near Jane, a fresh-faced and eager boy of not more than twelve years
of age was smiling eagerly at each farmer who passed him by. As time passed, his eagerness began to wear off and dejection took over…

  ‘Don’t worry, someone’s sure to take you, you’re a nice-looking boy,’ she whispered to him in encouragement.

  ‘There’s not a lot of work for half yins now,’ he said, ‘they want a full-grown man. But my father’s dead and there’s only me to help my mother and the other bairns in the house.’

  ‘How many of you are there?’

  He looked sad. ‘There’s six of us and the baby’s only a year old. If I don’t get work we’ll have to go on the parish.’

  She felt ashamed at feeling pity for herself. At least she still had her nest egg tucked away safely. The parish was at least a year off for her. Aylie, who had fallen asleep in her mother’s arms, woke up and began to whimper softly, for she needed feeding.

  An older woman in the bondager costume who had been standing apart from the rest came up to Jane and said, ‘If you want to feed your bairn, go into the inn, they’ve a room there that they’ll let you use. The landlady’s a decent woman. Say Meggie Andrews sent you.’

  The girl looked at the ruddy-faced woman and smiled. She could see that her costume, though clean, was much patched, and the brim of her hat was frayed though it, like her own, had been freshly lacquered.

  ‘Are you looking for a place too?’ she asked.

  The woman nodded.

  ‘Aye, I am that. My husband died last year and I need some place to live and some money coming in. My lassie’s over there, she wants a place in a house because she can’t bear the idea of working in the fields. She’s a very delicate lassie.’

  She nodded across to a sweet-faced girl of about thirteen dressed in a grey gown with a white apron, for she was offering herself as a maid of all work in a farmer’s household.

  ‘She’s so pretty,’ said Jane in admiration.