* * *
Of all the jobs around a farm Aylie enjoyed rick building best. It was a heavy job for a woman but she was proud of her prowess, standing on top of the rick of sheaves and building them up around her until they reached the proper height. Then she felt as if she were a queen on top of a battlemented tower gazing down at the rest of the world.
From her eyrie on top of the rick she watched the line of carts coming into the stackyard, one after the other, pulled by patient horses and loaded down with the harvest for 1851. It had been a good year, a plentiful year, a year when the sun had blessed them as they worked in the fields and the corn was gathered in without a single day of rain.
Good harvests meant good wages and the workers were as jubilant as the farmers. All over Britain, the yield had been good and the newfangled steam threshing mills would soon be busy beating out the wheat that would go to make flour to feed the workers toiling away in the country’s fast-growing industries. Great Britain was reaching a peak of prosperity, fortunes were being made by people of enterprise, and abroad the whole world was there to be conquered by a race with imperial ambitions. The British felt their country was the centre of the universe and no other people on earth could match them.
One of the labourers called up to Aylie, ‘Are you tired, Missus? I’ll give you a spell if you like.’
She stretched her arms above her head and thought that a cup of cold tea from the bottle she had brought with her might go down well, so she shouted back, ‘All right. I’ll come down,’ and swung her booted feet on to the ladder that leaned against the rick side. When she reached the ground, a man was holding the ladder steady for her so with a smile, she turned to thank him for this unusual courtesy.
‘Aylie,’ he said. ‘Oh, Aylie.’
It took her a few seconds before she realized who he was. As she stared at him she noticed that his face was very brown and deeply wrinkled and his two front teeth were broken. A strong smell of tobacco and rum came from him as he moved towards her. Putting out one hand she fended him off but he was not to be deflected.
‘Aylie, darling, don’t you know me? It’s Hugh, back from Botany Bay.’
‘Oh, my God,’ she gasped, unable to conceal her shock. ‘Oh, my God, Hugh. What’s happened to you?’
Then, to cover up this mistake, she threw her arms around his neck and clung desperately to him. She was in such a state of shock that she was afraid her heart was about to stop beating.
Both of them had dreamed so long about this reunion. He had lain in convict cells thinking about how he would go back to sweep her up in his arms and they would fall into bed together, as fierce and compatible in sex as they were before. She had dreamed romantically of him coming back and holding out his hands gently to her while speaking words of love. In her dreams the returned Hugh looked the same as he had done when he went away, still as strong, as handsome and as admirable as her gypsy husband had been on the day that Patie Mudie married them.
In the event, they were both disappointed though they felt that their disappointment was something which they should cover up even to themselves.
Hugh Kennedy had been broken and aged by his years of transportation. His hair, once as blue-black as a raven’s wing, was streaked with grey, and bad diet had rotted his fine teeth. The sun had baked his skin to the texture of leather, and dust and dirt from years past seemed to be engrained in the folds of the wrinkles along his brow and round his eyes. He looked wary, suspicious, distrustful, a man who trusted no one and who had no loyalties. After he had left you, there would be an impulse to pat your pockets.
When he looked at her, he saw the girl he had married, but in the body of an older woman. Of course, he had not expected anything else.
Aylie was still beautiful, dignified and ladylike, with the grace and reserve that had attracted him to her in the first place, but after so many years apart she had withdrawn from him. Living so long on her own had made her self-reliant and she no longer needed his protection. The impulse to protect her had been a large part of his love for her. He still longed to look after her.
With pride she showed him the little cottage that she owned; she told him about her work and he realized that she had her independence. His return was not going to improve her life.
The worst thing was that they felt so awkward when they talked to each other. She told him about the main events that had taken place since he left, about his father’s death and the death of her own mother.
He could see that the memory of Jane still pained her and said in an effort to console her, ‘But she was an old woman, wasn’t she?’
‘She was fifty-five. That’s not old,’ Aylie replied shortly.
She was eager to hear about Australia but its sun-soaked land seemed mercifully removed from his life and he was reluctant to discuss what had happened there. He knew nothing of the political events of his homeland over the past years and had little interest when she talked about them.
She was surprised to realize that her involvement in the labour reform movement did not please her returned husband, who sternly warned her off it by saying, ‘Get out of it now. I remember a convict called old Parr who sailed with me on the Eden. He was transported because of politics and he told his wife to keep their bairns out of them. I think the same as he did. Politics only get you into trouble. Leave them alone, Aylie.’
The only time the clock turned back for them was when they were in bed together. It was the place where the differences that had grown up between them over the years of separation were swept away. They were as passionate as when they first married and for many months the exaltation this caused Aylie closed her mind to other, less pleasant aspects of resumption of married life with Hugh. When they made love her heart broke for him because it was then that she saw the hideous scarring of his back.
‘Oh my God, Hugh, what happened to your back?’ she asked the first time she felt the scar tissue under her hands.
‘Don’t talk about it, Aylie, don’t ever ask me about it,’ he warned her.
He found it difficult to get work. Not only were farmers wary of taking on a returned convict, but his old reputation as a troublemaker was well remembered by people whose memories were long because so very little ever happened to them.
After his experiences in Botany Bay, Hugh was not anxious to buckle down to the life of a farm hind, to the regular drudgery; the early mornings; and, worst of all, the forelock-touching that was demanded of employees by many farmers. He’d had enough of that, the years of the lash and the shackle had left scars on him that were deeper than even he realized. He was full of unresolved and unfocused hate.
In the beginning Aylie did not press him to get work. She continued her own method of earning, going out in work gangs when money was required, but now that she had two people to feed, she had to work more frequently. Something warned her not to tell Hugh about the nest egg she kept in the bank at Melrose, and when he inquired how she had managed to buy the cottage, she told him it had taken all of the small legacy left to her by her mother. Some small warning voice counselled her to keep her secret from him. She would draw on the money to help him if necessary but that would be her decision – not his. She also knew that under the law he could claim any money she possessed as his own, and that was another reason for keeping quiet.
He lounged about the house and garden with his moods varying from high exaltation to deep depression. When he was exhilarated, he rode off on a borrowed horse to Yetholm and sometimes stayed away for two or three days at a time.
When he returned he explained that he had been caught up by his ‘own people’. He asked her to accompany him on these outings but the memory of his witchlike mother who, aged though she was, still ruled the Kennedy family with a rod of iron, kept her away.
When he was depressed he sat around the cottage or slumped in a chair on its doorstep, head hanging low and scarred hands idle in his lap, just thinking – what thoughts she dared not inquire. Coming out of those mood
s, he embraced her, hugged her to him as if she were his only treasure in the world, and even wept, a thing which she had never seen him do before. Then she loved and pitied him most of all for he seemed like a defenceless child who needed her comfort.
Sometimes, usually after an outing to Yetholm, he would have money in his pocket and then he bought extravagant presents for her or new clothes for himself, flashy clothes that made him look even more like an unreliable gypsy horse trader than he did when dressed in old working rags. His army of vagrant cousins enlisted his help in their horse-trading businesses and other unspecified pursuits, and with them he went off to Appleby in May and to the July fair at St Boswells where he trotted out horses and praised them in honeyed words that enraptured would-be buyers. He was very good at that, his golden tongue had not deserted him.
He had been at home for over a year when Aylie discovered that she was pregnant. This was the answer to her dreams… a baby at last! She could hardly wait to tell him.
‘I’m pregnant. We’re having a baby, isn’t it wonderful!’ she told him, but he received the news with a good deal less enthusiasm.
‘Do you want to have it?’ he asked. ‘If you want rid of it my mother knows a woman…’
She was shattered with disappointment. ‘Rid of it? Of course not. I’m longing for a child. Don’t you want a baby?’
He was dressing to go out on one of his escapades, and paused a little while before replying, ‘It wouldn’t make much difference to me. I’m happy here with just you and me. Chavies yell and make a lot of noise. I don’t like noise much.’
She thought he was being flippant and so she flounced off, saying, ‘I’ll keep it quiet, don’t you worry. I manage everything else round here.’
When they could not make love any longer because she grew so bulky, the breach between them widened. He often came home reeking of rum and fell fully dressed on to the bed, where he lay snoring till the next day. She resented the fact that, though pregnant, she had to go on working in order to support them both, for if he earned any money it was quickly wasted. Tales came back to her through neighbours about the generosity of her husband to his cronies in the Melrose alehouses… ‘A man aye eager to stand his hand,’ she was told.
She listened to this impassive faced, though inside she burned with anger. The money he was wasting on impressing people who cared nothing for him would have put coal in their hearth and food on their table. Eventually she tackled him about it. ‘I’m going to stop working now,’ she said in early March. ‘You’ll have to bring in money for a change. The baby’s due soon and I’ll need all my strength to deliver it. It’s a big bairn, I can see that by my belly, and I’m not so young, so I might have a hard time.’
There was genuine anxiety and love in his face as he looked at her.
‘Oh Aylie, take care of yourself, I’ll help you. Don’t worry about money, my people have a big scheme coming off soon… We’ll be in the money and you won’t need to work any more.’
In a flashback she remembered him promising her a silk gown in the days when he went smuggling, and the memory gave her a spasm of fear.
‘Hugh, forget the big schemes, just take work in the labouring gang. It’s good money and the farmer’ll take you on in my place. I’ve already spoken to him.’
He banged a fist on the table. ‘I’m not labouring in any gangs. I’ve had enough of gangs for the rest of my life. I’m better than that, I’m cut out for bigger things! You wait and see, I’ll show them all, I’ve a scheme that’ll take us out of here and into a mansion.’
This was too much for Aylie.
‘You damned fool,’ she snapped. ‘This little place is good enough for me and it’s better than anything your family ever had. You talk about mansions but every time you get a few pence together you go out and drink it. I won’t wait for your mansion or I’d be sure to be disappointed.’
After he slammed out of the house, they did not speak a civil word to each other for more than a week. What broke the impasse was Aylie going unexpectedly into labour in the middle of the night. Hugh had to run for the midwife who lived in the same hamlet and throughout the long labour he sat in a rocking chair by the fire, paralysed with fear.
The busy howdie, passing and repassing him, looked with curiosity at his trembling body, the hands twitching as they hung by his sides and the head slumped on his chest. No matter how she tried to chivvy him, she could arouse no response. Even when the child was born, and she presented him with a son tightly wrapped in a white blanket, he seemed little interested.
‘Is Aylie all right?’ he asked dully.
Urged to go up the rickety little stair to see her, he did so and at the sight of her waxen face among the pillows, he put his hands over his face and began to weep heartbrokenly. She could do nothing but hold her hands out to him and he fell on the bed beside her, utterly broken. When she eventually fell asleep, he threw on his coat and went out to get drunk. He did not come back for two days.
Hannah, 1858
They called their son Adam after Jane’s father and he grew into a handsome child. When he was five years old Aylie, to her consternation, found she was once again pregnant in spite of having taken all the precautions she knew against conception. Both she and Hugh were reluctant parents-to-be and she was worried because, at the age of forty-three, she dreaded another delivery. It was a wet and clammy summer and she could hardly drag herself to work.
Her dread proved to be fully justified because it was a slow and painful delivery. She went into labour on a Sunday. Hugh was in the house recovering from a hangover, but when her pains started he pulled himself together and helped her. When her suffering became acute, however, his distress was so evident that the howdie, remembering his reaction to the birth of Adam, sent him downstairs.
The pain was excruciating and it was impossible for Aylie to stifle her cries of agony. Soon her moans became screams and the noise of them was heard not only in the house but throughout the whole hamlet where whitefaced women huddled in their kitchens remembering the pains of past labours they had suffered themselves. In Aylie’s cottage her husband sat with his hands over his ears trying to shut out the sound, his face contorted as if in pain.
Then suddenly he went berserk, throwing himself around the room, smashing furniture, breaking china and, worst of all, howling like a maddened dog. Leaving Aylie, the midwife leaped down the ladder and tried to restrain him but it was like wrestling with an octopus and she had to ask some of the neighbours for help. It took five men to hold him down and even after he was tied up he did not seem to know who or where he was. It was as if he had been stricken with total amnesia.
In the middle of all the turmoil, their daughter was born.
* * *
After having looked the same for many years, Jock Hepburn was an old man. The reddish-coloured bush of hair was grey and his once straight back was so bent that he was supporting himself on a stick when he arrived at Aylie’s cottage with Sandy, now a grave-faced, middle-aged man who had the same air of rugged reliability as his father.
Aylie knew that Jock would never make the trip to see her on a working day without good reason so when she had brewed a pot of tea for the visitors, she sat down at her scrubbed kitchen table and waited to be told the reason for the visit. In the absence of a father or a grandfather, Jock had always played the male role in her young life. At times of trouble it was he who had come to help her mother and now he was doing the same for her.
‘How’s the bairns?’ he began by asking, and she indicated her son Adam, playing happily about on the rag hearthrug while the baby slept peacefully in the wooden cradle by the fire.
‘They’re fine, Adam’s getting big. He’ll have to go to school soon,’ she said with a smile.
Jock sipped his tea and his son gazed out of the cottage window at Aylie’s kitchen garden where the beanstalks were tall enough to tap on the window panes.
‘What name are you giving the wee girl?’ was Jock’s next questi
on, and Aylie’s face fell.
‘I wanted to call her Lark – that’s what my real name means in English – but Hugh laughed at the idea. He’s calling her Hannah after his mother.’
She saw Sandy shoot a look at her when she said this and she hoped her deep dislike of the old woman would not show in her face.
‘Is your man all right these days?’ asked Jock, and she realized that the reason he had come to her cottage was to discuss Hugh.
She looked bright. ‘He’s fine. He’s been away with his cousins at Newmarket. They have some relative who’s a jockey down there.’
Jock nodded, putting down his tea cup. ‘Aye, so I heard. Aylie, you should try to keep him at home or he’ll get into trouble again.’
Her face froze. She hated it when people reminded her of Hugh’s time as a convict.
‘He’s not doing anything wrong. He’s learned his lesson,’ she said defensively.
‘No, it’s not that. It’s just – it’s just that he talks a bit strange at times. People are noticing it and when the bairn was born – well, people said he went fair mad.’
She had grown used to Hugh’s outbursts of violent activity; to his swift swings of mood from exhilaration to depression. But she was not afraid of him because he was never violent towards her though she had heard there had been fights in alehouses in which his companions had to hold him back, so terrible were his rage and energy.
‘Do you mean you’ve heard that he’s been fighting?’ she asked Jock. She was not angry at his attempt to talk about her husband although she would not have allowed anyone else to do so.
The old man shook his head. ‘Not just that, it’s the wild way he’s behaving in general. It’s the way he talks sometimes – he’s been on about big schemes for making money, about backing horses that cousin of his rides in England – and he talks about selling horses to the Duke of Grafton and things like that, but nothing ever comes of them. They’re all in his imagination.’
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