The mistress, a grim-looking minister’s daughter who felt that by marrying a farmer she had lowered herself socially, spent most of her waking hours in a parlour jam packed with heavy furniture and gloomy paintings of her ancestors. There she brooded like a solitary malevolent owl, only making occasional swoops on the servants, tweaking their cheeks and upbraiding them in uncompromising terms. Nothing they did ever seemed to please her. She was a miserable woman with no children and few friends, so carriages never came rolling down the Myreheugh road with callers as they used to do at Maryfield. There were none of the cheerful comings and goings that Aylie had been used to.
She observed the domestic life of her employers with dismay and very soon realized that all exchanges between husband and wife were short and peremptory, made only for the sake of the listening servants. She was sure that when they were alone, they never spoke to each other at all, and each seemed to hold irreconcilable grievances against the other.
What was the biggest disappointment was that Phemie, a girl of her own age with whom she had hoped to become friendly, only spoke to her when it was absolutely necessary. Annoyed by this, Aylie turned on her when they were alone in the farmyard and said abruptly, ‘You don’t have much to say, do you? I’ve never seen you before. Where’s your home?’
The reaction was as if she had asked some taboo question, for the girl shot an anguished and suspicious glance at her before replying, ‘I’m from Bowden.’
‘Do you come from a farm place over there?’ Aylie knew most of the working people in that district through hunting round it with the Colonel.
‘No, my father’s the tailor there,’ said Phemie.
Like all Borderers, Aylie was pleased as soon as she could place a stranger. She relaxed a little and grinned. ‘Oh, I know him. He used to come up to Maryfield for orders when I was there with my mother. That was my last place.’
She remembered the old tailor, as white-faced and frail-looking as his daughter, who came to the farm cottages and sat cross-legged on a table while he sewed away at the cloth his customers had chosen. He only worked for men of course, women made their own clothes, but his tailoring was famous round about because it was always immaculate. Gilbert Kennedy, who like most head grooms was excessively dressy and fastidious about his clothes, had once said that suits made by Anderson rivalled in cut any the Colonel brought up from London. She repeated this compliment to his daughter and the strange girl smiled at last. She seemed pleased that Aylie thought well of her father.
They had walked around the corner of the cow byre and out of sight of the kitchen window, so Aylie put the metal scoop into the hen-food bucket and sat on the edge of the stone water trough, prepared to chat.
She asked Phemie, ‘Come on, you can tell me. What’s this place like? I’m beginning to wish I’d never come here. Nobody talks to you.’
The other girl did not sit down beside her but glanced back over her shoulder in a frightened way as if she were afraid to be caught slacking. ‘It’s the mistress, she’s always picking fault. Servants never stay with her more than six months or a year,’ she whispered.
‘How long have you been here?’ Aylie asked.
Phemie looked harried. ‘This’ll be my third year, but the master’s a cousin of my father. That’s why I came.’
Aylie was horrified. ‘Three years in this place! You could leave and get another hiring. There’s plenty of places for girls with experience of housework, or you could be a bondager like my mother. After only one day of house work, I think field work’s better. At least you’re out in the open and you’re independent. Your time off’s your own. It’s better fun too. Women on the land aye have plenty of jokes and company. I’ll be off next hiring day, I can tell you.’
Phemie was fidgeting, plainly anxious to get back to work. ‘I can’t leave here, my father wouldn’t let me. He thinks it better for me to work for a relation than to a stranger. Little does he know!’
Her words were bitter and her face as haggard as an old woman’s. She looked as if she did not get enough to eat. Aylie felt a sudden welling up of sympathy for this miserable girl.
‘Well, if the mistress is a bitch, what’s the boss like?’ she wanted to know.
At this question Phemie seemed to fly into a panic and the words rushed from her. ‘Oh, keep away from him. He’s my second cousin but he’s an awful man. Just keep out of his sight as much as you can.’ It sounded like a heartfelt warning.
Anything previously experienced by Aylie or told to her by her mother did not prepare her for Myreheugh. She had heard the usual labourers’ horror stories about farmers who held back wages; who raised sticks to workers; who cheated on their annual fixed allowances of potatoes or milk. She’d heard about men and women having to work in the fields when they were ill or till they were dropping with exhaustion, but she had never encountered such indifference to human feelings as she met with at Myreheugh.
The farmer – a fat, waddling man with a mottled, heavily veined face and mean pig-like eyes – never addressed anyone except in a hectoring shout. Many times she saw him bring his heavy metal-tipped stick down on the back of the hinds and orra men. A halfwit boy who could do nothing to defend himself was one of his favourite targets.
The boy’s mother, a bent, grey-haired bondager, stood by silently and watched her son being beaten, her eyes like those of a helpless wounded animal.
‘Why don’t you stop him beating your laddie? He’s doing no harm, he’s just a bit slow,’ Aylie protested to the woman one morning after a particularly vicious attack by the farmer on the boy.
The old woman shook her head at the girl. ‘Look at me, lassie. I’m an old woman and he’s not right in the head. Where would we ever get another place? Nobody would want us. If we didn’t stay here, it would be the poor’s house or we’d starve.’
There were eight other bondagers on the farm and they all worked silently with their heads down and spared no time for gossip. Everyone was anxious to get the work over as quickly as possible and spare themselves from their employer’s wrath. At Myreheugh there were no Saturday night dances, no fiddle or melodeon playing, no cheerful meetings or singsongs in each other’s cottages. The people were perpetually sunk in poverty and despondency, for their employer docked money off their wages for jobs he said were badly done, and there were many weeks when they ended up with less money than it took to feed themselves. The hovel-like cottages had holes in the thatches and no glass in the windows, which had to be stuffed with rags to keep out the perpetual wind.
They were full of starved-looking children who never went to school and downtrodden wives who bitterly resented having to find food for a bondager as well as for the other hungry mouths beneath their roofs.
Aylie was lucky. She got fed in the kitchen on the scraps from her employers’ table and she slept on a watertight floor. To her relief the bulk of her work was out of doors and because she was strong and able, she came in for little criticism. In fact, she sometimes felt as if the farmer was favouring her and that made her uneasy. From time to time he stopped to talk to her, his little eyes glinting and his wet, red mouth half open as he stared at her. He made her feel tainted and she always drew her shawl carefully over her breasts before she stopped to answer him.
‘Watch him, he’s mad for the lassies,’ warned an old hind who had eventually befriended the girl when he realized he had known her grandfather.
‘I’m watching him very carefully,’ she agreed.
* * *
She had been at Myreheugh for two months, and a very long time it seemed, when Hugh Kennedy arrived riding an eye-rolling, rangy black horse. He was looking very dashing in a battered cocked hat with a feather and a coat with embossed brass buttons which must once have graced the back of a gentleman.
When he saw Aylie in the field with the other women he grinned and waved his whip to her. It was break time so she could go over to speak to him without fear of reprimand.
She grabbed his stirrup iron t
o stop him riding off, and said accusingly, ‘Why did you get me this place? It’s awful. The farmer and his wife are horrible people. I’m afraid of them both.’
He leaned down teasingly towards her and said, ‘Come on, don’t tell me that! You’re not afraid of anything. I know you. Don’t you worry about old Myreheugh. He won’t try anything on with you because if he does, Hugh Kennedy’ll get him.’
Then the farmer came waddling out of the house and held up a hand, gesturing to Hugh to go across to him, but the gypsy sat proudly on his horse, staring boldly over without deference at the fat man. He was forced to walk across the mud to stand at the horse’s shoulder. As he came up, he gestured to Aylie to leave so she could not hear what was being said between them, but she watched closely and eventually saw Hugh’s shoulders rise in a cheeky shrug. Then he raised his hand in a mock salute and with a loud laugh, rode off.
The mother of the halfwitted boy asked Aylie, ‘Do you know young Kennedy?’
The girl nodded, ‘Yes, I know him, I used to work with his father.’
‘Oh, I ken Gilbert too, he’s not like his son. That’s a dangerous one. Some folk say he’ll end on the gallows. He’s into everything.’
‘He’s into everything…’ The words rang in Aylie’s ears as she worked at cleaning what seemed to be acres of muck out of the big cowshed. It was the filthiest task on the farm and she was glad to have something other than the smell to occupy her mind. She went over the short meeting with Hugh Kennedy. How did he get a horse like that? It was a blood horse, worth a bit of money, yet he was only a labourer like herself. And why was he not out working like all the other labourers? Where was he working anyway? She realized that she knew little about him but that his appeal, the feeling of adventure that he gave off, acted on her as a linseed trail did to a hound. She had to follow it and no amount of warning would put her off.
* * *
They were unable to work because of the rain when he came the next time. All the bondagers were huddled into the hay shed watching the rain teeming down and turning the dirty yard to a sea of mud. The women’s depression was intensified by the knowledge that until it stopped and they were able to go back to the fields, there would be no pay for them.
Aylie, who was saving in order to take a nest egg home to her mother as the only bonus from this dreadful year, sat with her clenched fists supporting her head in the battered and discoloured straw hat. There was no incentive at Myreheugh to keep herself smart or spend money on black japanning for her bonnet.
Then, through the grey sheets of rain, came Hugh Kennedy on a different but equally flashy horse. He jumped off and, leading it by the reins, came into the shed to sit beside her on the hay, letting the horse nuzzle his pockets for a titbit. The terrible memory of the Colonel’s death was beginning to recede for Aylie and her love of horses came sweeping over her as strong as ever when she stroked the velvety muzzle and let the soft, tentative lips search over the palm of her hand.
‘I came to tell you that there’s a meeting up in the schoolroom tonight,’ said Hugh, ‘I wondered if you’d want to go.’
She was surprised and interested. ‘What’s it about?’
His voice was low as he replied, ‘It’s about forming a union, there’s a lot of talking going on and some people are going to speak against the bondage system. I thought you might be interested.’
She was very interested. Her experiences since she left Maryfield had taught her that the conditions of labouring people, especially labouring women, were an insult to human dignity. Now from first-hand experience she knew women who were downtrodden and allowed themselves to be treated like animals by their hinds in order to keep a job; she knew others who were forced to share the hind’s bed while his bitter wife slept in the next room with her children. She knew women who lived in an atmosphere of sheer hell because of the jealousies, justified or otherwise, of the hind’s wife. Aylie’s own proud spirit hated the idea that any of those indignities might be forced on her or her beloved mother. So far they had been lucky, but how long would their luck last? Now she knew that there were few Colonel Scroggies in her world. People like her and Jane needed work and they had no bargaining power at all, for once they signed or made their cross on a bond, they were literally the property of the man they’d signed themselves away to for a year. To break it was to bring down on yourself a lifetime of unemployment.
‘I’ll go,’ she said with decision.
‘It starts at seven o’clock,’ Hugh told her.
He said nothing about meeting her there or even if he was going himself. When she told Phemie that she was going out to a meeting about the union campaign, the other girl was shocked.
‘You’d better not, word’ll get out if you’re seen there. You won’t get another job so easily if you’re a troublemaker.’
Phemie had gradually come to speak openly to Aylie and to relax when she was with her but there was still something hidden and secret about her that she would not divulge.’m not a troublemaker. I’m only going to listen to what’s said. Why don’t you come too?’
Aylie’s colour was high and she was excited at the prospect of her outing, but Phemie refused to go, making a variety of feeble excuses.
‘Then I’ll come back and tell you what goes on,’ said Aylie.
Later that night she went out into the rain with her shawl drawn up over her head and a layer of sacking across her shoulders. In spite of its protection she was soaking when she reached the little schoolroom about a mile and a half away. To her surprise it was packed full of people she had never seen before. They were mostly men – only two or three women could be seen among the throng – and the workers at Myreheugh were represented only by Aylie herself. There was no sign of Hugh.
She sat on a bench at the back of the dark room and gazed around. The first thing that struck her was that everyone looked angry.
Their anger reflected the mood of the whole Borders during 1835 because the much-vaunted Reform Bill of 1832, in spite of everyone’s high hopes, had done nothing for the labouring classes. Even after the new legislation was enacted and the franchise was extended, only one man in eight in Scotland had the vote. The rest remained disenfranchised landless labourers or industrial workers who were dominated by employers all eagerly intent on improving their social status and making themselves rich, rich, rich.
Yet, because the Scots had a reverence for learning, there were among them many men of the mould of Adam Cannon and his brother-in-law Tom Armstrong, as politically conscious, intelligent and well read as the men who denied them a vote. Most of the hinds on Border farms could read and write and many of them made up songs and poetry with a fluency which would have won them acclaim in other societies. These were the men who were furiously angry. Their women, on the other hand, had so few expectations that they were rarely disappointed.
The anger of some families took them off the land which they loved but where they had no prospects except to slave for the rest of their lives. They went to the growing industrial towns of the district where emergent woollen and cloth mills were turning out rolls of cloth to be sent south. The Borderers had long been known for their skill at weaving but till the early nineteenth century it had been a cottage industry, centred in small villages. Now it was concentrated in two or three towns where mill owners built new buildings and installed new machinery powered most efficiently by the swiftly running Border rivers. One day there would be work aplenty, for women as well as for men.
Yet although those who went to the town earned more money and were free of the feudalism that had ruled their lives, amid the noise of the clattering mills they still dreamed of the fields and the lonely hills. They were a rural people, bred from a race that had always lived on the land and did not take kindly to being penned up from the early morning mill whistle to the end of the shift at nightfall.
Others, more adventurous, were driven by their disappointment after 1832 to go abroad. In this way the most dynamic people removed themselves
from the scene, leaving the more timid and acquiescent behind.
Ships sailed every day out of Greenock for Canada and America with their quota of emigrant Borderers, men and women weeping at the pain of leaving their cottages and farmsteads. Their homes were lonely and abandoned, crumbling into piles of stones, the haunt of ravens and foxes. Eventually only spring snowdrops or rose bushes with sweetly scented flowers clambering round broken stone lintels in summertime marked what had once been a garden. The pain of leaving their homeland gave rise to the songs of nostalgia and longing that exiled Borderers – and emigrant Scots everywhere – sang with such feeling.
Those who remained behind discussed the news that filtered slowly through to them and they suffered silently under their sense of impotence. Like the patient, plodding horses so many of them drove over the land, they were weighed down by the demands of employers and over that, by the feudal dominance that was exercised in the entire Borderland by the gentry – dukes, lords and earls who knew without question that they were not like other men. They expected that their slightest whim would be gratified by people who, in many cases, shared their ancestry of thieving Border reivers. But no one dared to say that a duke’s ancestors had only been more unprincipled, more savage rogues than the ancestors of those who touched their forelocks to him.
From her seat Aylie watched the crowd and listened to their talk. Though no one actually said it, the main strain of complaint was that they had been denied the rights of other men; they felt as good as anyone else but equality was officially denied them.
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