Lark Returning

by Lark Returning (retail) (epub)

‘Oh aye,’ said the girl’s mother with a sad note in her voice, ‘she’s too pretty. The pretty girls don’t get hired by farmers’ wives, or if they do, they often find themselves in trouble. I’m trying to make sure she gets a good house. I know most of the folk who come here, you see. My man worked as a shepherd on a farm not far away, and my father was there before him. I’ve lived here for thirty years. If somebody offers for you, I’ll tip you the wink too. Some of them sound plausible enough but it’s a different story once you’ve taken their shilling.’

  The inn was poky and smelled strongly of beer but the landlady was friendly and she ushered Jane into a back parlour where she could breastfeed Aylie in front of a roaring fire.

  As she was buttoning up her dress and preparing to return to the square, the landlady came back in with a pot of ale and thrust it into her hand, saying, ‘Feeding mothers need nourishment. Take it, it’s a present. I had to stand in hiring fairs myself once and I know what it’s like. My, but that’s a bonny bairn you’ve got there.’

  In baby worship, the two women looked down at Aylie kicking on the hearthrug and Jane smiled, for she thought her daughter was the loveliest child ever born and it delighted her when other people commented on her beauty. Her own hated freckles had not appeared on the baby’s soft white skin. In the infant features she saw a look of the handsome father – the long, eloquent mouth, the frank and open eyes. She wanted nothing of herself to come out in her daughter because she did not value her own beauty, thinking herself too large, too freckled and too blonde. Blaize’s Gallic looks were what she most admired.

  Back in the square, most of the farmers had made their bargains with the shepherds, hinds and carters and now it was the turn of the hired hinds to rush about finding themselves bondagers because each man had to supply a woman to work alongside him, in accordance with the bargain he’d made with his new employer. Stronglooking young women were besieged with offers and Jane was pleased to see three or four men haggling round her friend Meggie, whose daughter too seemed to have found work because she was standing beside her mother smiling proudly.

  With her baby in the crook of her arm, Jane took up her stance again beside the little group and the young boy paused beside her to say, ‘I got a place. I’m all fixed up. I hope you get some place too, soon.’ In a little while the attention of some of the wandering men switched to her for she made a striking sight.

  The first man to speak was a long-faced man of about forty whose smile looked false. ‘You’re a strong-looking lassie, what’s your terms?’ he asked her.

  She was flummoxed by this for she hadn’t worked out what she should ask. Her father had always made the bargain with Glendinning.

  ‘Where will you be working?’ she asked, and he named a farm she knew to be on the other side of the village of St Boswells. Then she asked a question which caused several eavesdroppers to look at her in surprise. ‘Can you see the Eildons from there? I won’t work in any place that doesn’t have a view of the Eildons.’

  The man laughed. ‘Oh aye, you see them well enough, the farm stands right on the edge of the farthest Eildon. Our sheep graze on it.’

  Before she committed herself, Jane looked across at Meggie and saw her new friend gently shaking her head in warning.

  ‘No thank you,’ she said firmly, trusting Meggie’s judgement. ‘I don’t think I want to work with you.’

  With a curse, the man walked away, shouting back over his shoulder, ‘You and your bastard bairn might find it harder than you think to get a place, Miss high and mighty Cannon.’

  The morning wore on and Jane was still standing alone, for the sight of Aylie caused approaching hinds to turn on their heel and walk away. She was growing desperate when Jock Hepburn came up and stood looking at her, his eyes vulnerable with longing.

  ‘I hate to see you standing here like this. Let me hire you, Jane, come with me as my bondager. I’m needing a lassie.’

  ‘You’re not. I know fine you’re staying on at Charterhall and your mother’s your bondager. What would she do if you hired somebody else? You can’t afford two bondagers.’

  ‘She’d find a job in her own right. She’s one of the best bondagers in the district, you know that. She’s even a grand hand with the horses.’

  ‘I won’t have her making way for me. She doesn’t want to leave Charterhall any more than I do. Besides I can’t come and stay in the house with you, Jock. You know what people would say and I’m not going to marry you. It’d only mean pain for you. You’ve got to forget me. You must.’

  Jock looked sad but her reaction did not really surprise him. ‘I can’t. I’ll never forget you. But if you won’t work for me, I’ll find you someone who’ll treat you well. Just wait here.’

  In less than five minutes he was back, bringing with him a red-faced older man in a checked suit who exhaled a strong smell of whisky into the cold air. He grinned and looked at Jane with frank admiration in his eyes.

  Then he said to Jock, ‘My word, Hepburn, that’s a grand lassie. She’ll make a great worker. I don’t mind the bairn, my wife’ll take it in with our ain.’

  Jane was doubtful about agreeing to a bargain with him but Jock assured her it was all right and even Meggie was nodding away in agreement over the old man’s shoulder. So she took the man’s arles, the customary shilling which he pressed into her hand on the sealing of their bargain, and then she found herself bound to work as a bondager with Archie Turnbull for a year. He agreed to pay her ten pence on the days the farmer wanted her labour; to keep her in his house; provide her with food and, a generous gesture, also provide food for her daughter. The farm where he was going to work was called Maryfield and it was situated on the slope of the Black Hill, directly facing her beloved Eildons. From the farmyard, he told her, she could even see the trees that embowered her old home, Charterhall abbey.

  * * *

  The traditional day for farm servants moving from one job to another was 12 May, and on the night before moving day, Jane could not sleep. Rising at about two o’clock in the morning, she pulled a shawl over her nightgown and went outside to wander round the grounds of her beloved home. It was once again quiet and peaceful and the trees were growing back over the fallen walls, because after the death of young Glendinning quarrying at the abbey had ceased and the old landowner completed his stable block with new stone.

  In spite of his depredations there was still a lot of the original abbey buildings left. She wandered around, examining every nook and cranny in the light of the full moon, anxious to imprint the memory of them on her mind. It was a magnificent night, the moon shone like a huge silver coin in the middle of the sky and there was not a sound except the occasional swoop and screech of a hunting owl.

  Suddenly she was infused with energy and rushed back into the house to pack her most precious possessions into an old brass-bound chest. Carefully she laid in a bundle of ancient and cracking vellum manuscripts, some of them illuminated with paintings like jewels down the margins, intricate coloured drawings which her father had told her were the work of the monks of Charterhall. If only he could decipher the Latin, he said, he would know the history of the abbey. She also hid Alice’s herbal books; a couple of big silver spoons and an elegant silver chalice that had been in the family possession since the abbey fell into ruin. She thought about hiding Blaize’s jacket in the trunk too but instead laid it on top of her sleeping baby. She believed that no evil spirit would harm a child if it slept under something that belonged to its father.

  Then she heaved the trunk out of the house, down the stairs and across the cloister yard to a dark corner of the old gateway tower where there was a hidden cellar that only the Cannon family knew about and to which they owned the only key. In the days of Border wars, when raiders came, they used to hide there till trouble passed. Because it had not been used for years, the cellar door was now almost hidden by trees and tangled ivy. That hiding place, though she did not know it, had once been a cell for penitent monks, and in it she
now secreted her trunk of treasures, pulling the ivy back carefully when she was finished.

  She was tired and was walking slowly back through the grass-floored nave when the singing began – cold, clear voices were rising and falling in a medieval chant from somewhere above her head.

  It was an ethereal, icy cold sound that stopped her in her tracks but, strangely, did not make her afraid. She had heard it once before when she was a little girl and it had not frightened her then either. She stood still, clutching the shawl round her shoulders, and listened to the voices of men dead for hundreds of years rising to the heavens in a contrapuntal chant. They were singing words which she did not understand but she was transported by the purity and glory of their voices. She knew that the monks of the abbey were granting her a last privilege. They were sending her on her way with proof of the secret of the place she loved so much.

  It was also local custom that new employers send a cart to transport a worker’s belongings to their new home, and early next morning Jane and Aylie were wakened by the sound of wheels outside the window. It was a carter from Maryfield, come to take her away from Charterhall. When she showed him what had to be moved, he looked surprised, for there were only one trunk and a bundle of bedding.

  ‘You haven’t a lot. Where’s the rest of your stuff? They said you’d have a houseful to move.’

  She shook her head. ‘I gave most of it away.’

  She had given away most of the bits of furniture and tools. The secret of the hidden trunk she would keep to herself.

  Maryfield was a large farm about three miles from Charterhall, set above fertile daisy-covered meadows that stretched along one bank of the river Leader and with sheep pastures that extended well up the scree slopes of the Black Hill. It was farmed by a good-humoured, lazy gentleman called Colonel Scroggie whose only interest in life was fox hunting, a pursuit he enthusiastically followed over the surrounding hills and coppices behind his own pack of foxhounds.

  The Colonel’s stable was full of highly bred hunters and his house was the resort of roistering hunting cronies who drank port as if it were water and hurray-ed and halloo-ed well into the early hours of the morning whenever the Colonel gave a supper party.

  Their employer’s good spirits and joie de vivre was passed on to the people who worked for him and his farm toun was a happy place. Jane, who had only ever worked at Charterhall, felt the different atmosphere the moment the cart swung round the corner of the farm road and a line of workers’ cottages came into view. Groups of men and women were standing around gossiping and laughing. Obviously none of the people here lived in mortal dread of their farm steward as they did at Charterhall.

  Old Archie and his red-cheeked wife Bertha were busy moving into their new home, which was the last cottage in a row of seven. They were happily shouting at each other, cuffing their children and tripping over animals on their way to and fro from another cart, piled so high with possessions that it looked in danger of capsizing. Jane was amazed to see that Bertha was resplendent in a huge hat with a tall white ostrich feather nodding in its band.

  When she saw Jane staring at her glorious headgear, Bertha laughed and said, ‘You’re admiring my flitting hat. I keep it for moving days and never put it on any other time. It makes me feel grand and proud sitting up on top of our things with my feather bobbing about.’

  Archie grinned when he saw Jane climbing down from her cart. ‘Come on over here, lassie,’ he shouted, ‘and help me with this box of hens. You take them into the back yard and untie their legs.’

  Jane did not like the fierce way hens could peck at her hands and she drew back slightly.

  Archie reassured her, ‘They’ll no’ peck you. They’re as tame as wee doves. My, they’re so tame that on flitting days they lie on their backs with their legs up in the air for me to tie them thegither.’

  Everyone laughed at this and a man in the crowd said, ‘You must have done a lot of flitting, Archie, if your hens are like that. Does no place ever suit you?’

  Bertha replied, ‘Oh, he likes wandering about does my man, but this time we’re going to stay put. I’m tired of packing up every flitting day. I’m not going to let him move again.’

  Archie had indeed been a wanderer, going from farm to farm throughout the Borders. He’d even worked in Northumberland, people said, when discussing the extent of Archie’s travelling. But now that he was growing older he was happy to find himself a comfortable berth at Maryfield, which had the reputation of being the best place to work for a good thirty miles.

  On her first night in the farm, after all the work of settling in was completed, Jane sat at the cottage door with the others and heard the tales about her new employer, Colonel Scroggie.

  ‘He’s a real gentleman is the Colonel,’ said a woman with a clutch of children clinging to her skirt. ‘I’ve been here ten years and in all that time I’ve never heard of him being unfair to anyone. He’ll not stand for his workers being abused, no steward of his would ever dare raise a stick to a worker.’

  The others nodded in agreement. They knew only too well that there were places where women as well as men had been beaten to the ground by stick-wielding stewards.

  ‘Do you mind that time last autumn when the Colonel heard about Richardson down the road at Cleughfoot using two bondager women to pull a plough because one of his horses was sick?’ asked a young man lounging with his back against the cottage wall.

  The motherly woman nodded vigorously in agreement. ‘Aye and he went down there with his face bright red and he told Richardson, “Don’t you let me hear of you using women as draught animals again or I’ll be round with my horsewhip.” One of the women’s my cousin and she told me what the Colonel said. Richardson was fair affronted.’

  The listeners sucked in their breath with appreciation. ‘He’s a real gentleman is the Colonel,’ they all agreed.

  Jane climbed the ladder to her shake-down bed on the loft floor of the little cottage, feeling happier than she had been for a very long time. She was going to be well treated by Archie and Bertha who had given her and Aylie a good supper and shown them loving kindness.

  When she lay down on the straw-filled mattress and closed her eyes, her mind as always wandered back to Blaize… Where is he tonight? she wondered.

  She gave no hint to the outside world how bitterly unhappy she was at not having heard from him for over a year, and there were times when she asked herself if she had been wrong to trust him. Was Blaize untrue? Had he returned to France and conveniently forgotten her and Aylie? But then she remembered their days and nights together; she remembered how they clung together on the jetty at Berwick and she knew it was wrong to mistrust him.

  ‘I know I’ll hear from him again,’ she whispered, laying one hand on the Hussar’s jacket that covered the sleeping child by her side. Then she fell asleep.

  * * *

  Jane was deeply grateful to Jock for having found her such a happy place with Archie and Bertha. She had heard enough stories of the miseries of bondagers’ lives not to appreciate her situation even though Bertha’s children were noisy day and night and the cooking was very rough and ready. Her food was abundant and ungrudged and she was treated well, not like many other women in her position who had to live with grudging hinds who tried to skimp on every bit of food, or with a man who cheated them of their wages and assumed that the terms of bondage included the woman sharing his bed as well as his work in the fields.

  The only fault that Archie could be said to have was that every Saturday night he got happily drunk and fell into bed beside an equally merry Bertha to make enthusiastic and noisy love. On Sunday morning, with sore heads and solemn faces, they forced themselves up, and after they’d done their tasks around the farm, they dressed in their best black and walked their protesting children to the church in Earlston. In spite of frequent invitations Jane refused to accompany them because she could never forgive the minister for his refusal to christen Aylie.

  When she told Bert
ha her reason for not going to church, the hind’s wife looked solemn and asked, ‘But does it not worry you that the bairn’s not been baptized?’

  Jane nodded. ‘Yes, it does, very much. All my family were churchgoers… I worry that if anything were to happen to her, she’d go to Hell.’

  Bertha clicked her tongue in commiseration. ‘I don’t believe bairns go to Hell just because the minister’s not splashed water on them, but if it does worry you, I’ll christen her. Anybody can baptize a bairn, you know. They say Mary Queen of Scots baptized the daughter of her serving woman. I’m no queen but I’ll baptize Aylie.’

  And next Sunday afternoon she did, solemnly dipping her fingers into her best china bowl and incanting the words of the baptism service which she had memorized while watching the minister performing the same function that morning for a baby born within wedlock. When she handed back the crying little girl, who had not liked cold water being trickled over her face, she said, ‘It’s good she’s greetin’, it means she’s driven out the devil.’

  Jane felt safe now, less anxious that Aylie would be snatched away from her by evil spirits or fairies – along with her other superstitions, she had a strong belief in the little people.

  * * *

  Three or four years of working at Maryfield passed and she grew less miserable inside. She often paused in her work to stare out across the fields at her beloved Eildon hills, and one day realized, with an uplifting of the heart, that in spite of her secret sorrow and longing for Blaize, she was happy most of the time. Her beloved Borderland was holding her safe, sheltering her and Aylie beneath the folds of the hills, hills which had moods like people, sometimes smiling and soft, other times threatening and forbidding but always magical, awe-inspiring and reassuring.

  In the summer when she was thirty, Jock came over the hill and, standing stiffly in the cottage garden, asked her again to marry him.