Aylie was frightened by the passion in her daughter. ‘Don’t go around here talking like that,’ she warned. ‘If they hear you, you know what they’ll say…’
‘They? Who’s they?’ asked Hannah scornfully. ‘You mean the authorities, the upper classes, the masters, don’t you? And what would they say, Mother? They’d say that Hugh Kennedy’s daughter is going the same way as her father. First a rebel and then a lunatic. That’s what they’d say, isn’t it?’
Aylie put an arm round her daughter and hugged her tight. ‘Oh, don’t be so angry, Hannah. What are you so angry about?’
Aylie was never to know who fathered her granddaughter, for she never asked Hannah any questions. It did not matter, for when the baby girl arrived she was beautiful, very blonde, ivory-skinned and perfect. Aylie had never seen such a lovely child and she held the tiny body in her arms with love and adoration showing in her face while the howdie finished settling Hannah. It had been a straightforward birth and Hannah, true to character, was stoical throughout. Now she lay back against the pillows and, with a smile, watched her mother cuddle her daughter.
‘She looks like you, Mother. It’s a good present I brought back to you from London, isn’t it?’
Aylie looked up from her scrutiny of the tiny face with tears shining in her eyes. ‘Oh Hannah, will you please call her Lark? I wanted to call you Lark but your father wouldn’t let me.’
Hannah frowned. ‘He was right, Lark wouldn’t have suited me one bit – but, to please you, I’ll call her Lark. It’s a pretty name really.’
* * *
Morning and evening, rain or shine, Aylie walked around her garden, checking on her plants and staring out at the countryside that spread around her home. From the upstairs window Hannah watched her mother gazing about as if she were seeing the world for the first time, and every day the routine was the same.
When Aylie came in, she might say, ‘It’ll be sunny by dinner time’ or ‘It’s going to rain all day…’ and sometimes she would rush in, gasping, ‘Come and look at this sunset. I’ve never seen such a wonderful sky!’
‘You’re so pagan, Mother, I’ve never known anyone so rooted in the soil as you,’ said Hannah shortly one day. Her mother’s unchangeable programme was beginning to annoy her.
‘I suppose it’s because I come from a long line of people who’ve always lived close to nature,’ said Aylie.
‘But what about your aristocratic French father – he couldn’t have been so bucolic?’
‘The rest of my ancestors overcame his influence, I expect,’ Aylie replied. ‘Anyway I don’t feel half French, I feel – sometimes I feel as if I was like that tree growing out there, I’m so rooted in this earth.’
‘I’m not,’ said Hannah fiercely, ‘I can’t stay too long in any one place. I need excitement…’
‘That’s the gypsy in you, I expect,’ said her mother. ‘Your father’s people were always on the move – they spent the whole summer wandering about. They settled down in Yetholm in the winter time, but when spring came their feet itched.’
‘I know the feeling,’ was the wistful reply. ‘When I look out at your precious hills all I want to know is what’s happening on the other side of them.’
Aylie’s face looked sad as she leant down and lifted the baby out of its nest of blankets in the cradle. As she held it in her arms it opened its brilliant blue eyes and stared silently back at her. Hannah, watching them, turned her head away as if to shut out the sight. That night, when they had eaten supper, she suddenly laid the baby in her mother’s lap.
‘Here, Mother, you take her. You really love her, I can see that, and I don’t feel I can stay here any longer. Will you keep her for me?’
Aylie cuddled the baby, smelling the sweet milkiness of it.
‘But I’m nearly seventy-seven years old,’ she protested. ‘It wouldn’t be right for an old woman to bring up a little child, she’d be old before her time.’
Hannah snorted. ‘Nonsense, you’re the youngest seventy-seven-year-old I’ve ever known. You’re well in yourself, aren’t you? You’re not sick? You can still walk ten miles a day and never feel tired.’
‘Oh I’m well enough, it’s her I’m worried about. What if something happens to me?’ Aylie wanted the baby but she saw the dangers more clearly than her daughter did.
Hannah swept her objections aside. ‘I’ll keep in touch all the time, I promise. If you get sick or too tired, I’ll take her back, I promise you, Mother. She’ll be better off with you. My life in London isn’t a good life for a child.’ Aylie had realized that long ago, and it had worried her, so she nodded.
Seeing her weaken, Hannah pressed on, ‘I haven’t much money but I’ll send what I can.’
Her mother shook her head, she had made up her mind… ‘Don’t worry about money. Adam sends me money regularly. I’ll use it for Lark, he’d like that.’
Once the agreement was made between them, Hannah could not wait to leave the country. Within a week she was back in London, back to her old haunts, among her revolutionary friends. Kropotkin encouraged her to write pamphlets setting out the Anarchist beliefs and she proved so effective at this that her name soon became known in revolutionary circles throughout Europe.
* * *
Having Lark to love transformed Aylie’s life. No longer was she lonely, no longer did she feel like a useless old woman. People who saw them together wondered at her energy and, because her hair was still only lightly streaked with grey, a few short-sighted individuals thought that she was Lark’s mother, who had produced a baby late in life.
Lark was an easy child to rear, perhaps because she was instinctively aware of her grandmother’s limitations. She was never unruly, never tried to run away from home like Hannah used to do. She caused Aylie no anxiety at all. Having her in the house was like having a friend, a confidante, a companion.
They talked together in adult terms from the time the child was very young and Aylie loved to tell her stories of the past. She talked more freely to Lark than she had ever done to her own children.
The life the little girl led was exactly like the childhood of Aylie herself, a gentle childhood among the fields and woods, a childhood closely linked to the rounds of the seasons and the weather.
Their favourite excursions, always by foot, were to the Hepburns’ farmhouse, to some local fairs and, most of all, to the ruined abbey at Charterhall where they inspected the family grave and stood in awe in the cave where Jane had lived for so many years.
‘It must have been very cold here, Grandmama,’ said six-year-old Lark with a shiver one winter afternoon.
‘Oh, not when my mother was here. She had a fire in that corner and everything was so snug and cosy. She was so happy here. I think if she’d ever had to leave this place she’d have died of a broken heart.’
The child gazed at the ruins with round eyes. ‘It’s lovely, and it’s so old. But it’s awfully sad somehow. It makes me want to cry, Grandmama.’
The Hepburns were growing richer with every year that passed. In spite of the severe downturn that hit agriculture in the 1880s the family thrived through hard work and enterprise, so when other farmers were being driven out of business it was often to Sandy Hepburn that their land was sold. Yet in spite of success, the family stayed simple in their tastes and as considerate towards their workers as old Jock had been. To the farm labourers round about, a place on a Hepburn farm was the most highly desired of all. Hepburn workers were not crowded with their families into ramshackle sheds and bothies, for even before Jock’s death, building had started on lines of neat stone cottages for the workforce.
Aylie was as full of pride at Sandy’s achievements as if he had been her own son. When she took Lark to visit the Hepburns, the child sat stiffly on the edge of a high-backed chair that prickled her legs through her dress and gazed in awe at the massive furniture. She liked it best when Mrs Hepburn played the piano and sometimes Lark would be asked to sing for it had already become obvious th
at she had inherited Jane’s beautiful singing voice.
With tears of pride and happiness in her eyes Aylie sat and listened to the young treble voice singing the old ballad songs. ‘You sound exactly like my mother,’ she told the child.
Kirsty, Sandy’s daughter by his second marriage, was some six years older than Lark, and she had a brother, two years her junior, called Simeon, but always referred to by his family as Sim. He was a lanky lad with his grandfather’s bush of reddish hair and from his eminence he stared down at little Lark who, as soon as she could walk, began following him around like an adoring puppy. She watched everything he did, listened while he talked to the men in the farmyard and trailed after him when he took his gun into the woods in search of pheasants. Her devotion sometimes irked him but he was nearly always tolerant and only when she got in his way or was in danger of being peppered with shot did he shout at her to go home.
* * *
Hannah kept her promise and did not abandon her child entirely. From her travels around the Continent during the ten years after Lark’s birth, she sent regular letters and postcards. One from Madrid announced in breathless style her survival from the riots that had broken out during an Anarchist assembly there.
These missives were received with wonder by the old woman and the child at Charterhall village, and Lark carried the Madrid card to school to show to her teacher and the other children. It gave her a feeling of great importance to have a mother who had seen such wonderful things as riots.
On the two occasions when that wonderful mother actually came to visit, however, she proved to be a disappointment. The first time was when Lark was three years old, and later she could remember little about it except that her mother brought her a white lawn dress with ribbons at the neck and deep broderie anglaise ruffles round its hem. She wore the dress for ages after it no longer fitted her, even until it was in danger of splitting down the back every time she moved her arms. Then she used it to dress her doll.
The second time Hannah came, Lark was seven and growing into a leggy tomboy whose only ambition in life was to have a pony. On that visit Hannah arrived in a great state of agitation, bursting into the cottage crying, ‘I’ve come to say goodbye. I’m going to a meeting in Vienna and they might assassinate me there!’
With a warning look towards the child, Aylie rose from her chair and said, ‘Oh, Hannah, don’t be so dramatic. Of course nobody will assassinate you.’
‘They’ve assassinated others. I’ve been warned,’ said Hannah with utmost satisfaction at this proof of her standing in the movement. ‘But I’m not afraid. I just wanted to say goodbye to you both before I went.’
‘It’s a long way to come just for that,’ said Aylie in a dampening way, and bustled about preparing an extra place at the table.
Lark and Hannah had little to say to each other and she was acutely embarrassed by her mother’s bizarre dress, which was so very different to anything worn by the other women in the district. Hannah still favoured loose-flowing medieval robes in brilliant jewel-like colours, which suited her well but made her stand out in the crowd of more conventionally dressed people.
When the children at Lark’s school teased her about her funnily dressed mother, she ran home in tears but would not tell Aylie what she was crying about. However, her grandmother had a good idea of the reason.
Hannah stayed for two days, sleeping most of the time, and when she departed she left a greatly relieved daughter behind her.
* * *
In the summer of 1901, Aylie was eighty-six. It was a hot June and the sultry weather slowed her down, making her move slowly. She was showing her age at last and Lark hated having to leave her grandmother on the fine sunny mornings to sit in a stuffy schoolroom chanting tables and reading laboriously from the tattered primers. It would soon be holiday time, she thought, as she fidgeted in her seat on the bench beneath the high window. Then she would be free to run wild from morning till night and Sim would be home too. If he let her, she’d wander around with him. His pony was out at grass so there would be no riding, but they could go fishing, or exploring the ruins of the abbey perhaps… Her mind wandered off at pleasant tangents and she did not hear the schoolmistress, who had replaced Hannah’s old dominie, sharply calling her name…
‘Yes, Miss.’ She sprang sharply to attention when her neighbour dug an elbow in her ribs. The teacher had someone else beside her – it was Mrs Gillespie, their next-door neighbour from the village.
‘Come up here a moment, Lark dear, will you?’ the teacher’s voice was unusually kind.
She stood up, carefully adjusting her white bibbed apron, and walked through the lines of the little ones’ chairs to the front where the two women stood whispering.
Mrs Gillespie’s eyes were red-rimmed as if she had been crying, and she tried to put her arms round Lark when the girl stepped on to the dais on which the teacher’s desk stood.
‘Take her outside, don’t tell her here,’ said the teacher.
Mrs Gillespie led a scared Lark into the passage outside the schoolroom door where she stopped and whispered, ‘Oh, Lark, it’s your granny, she’s – she’s not very well.’
Lark felt her chest close on her heart and it was difficult to breathe properly.
‘What’s wrong with Granny? Can I go home to see her?’
Mrs Gillespie gave a sob. ‘Oh Lark, she’s dead, your granny’s dead. I saw her lying in the garden beside her raspberry canes and when I went over to her she was dead… She couldn’t have felt anything, bairn.’
‘Granny dead!’ Lark could not believe it. Her mind simply could not take it in and it was a long time before she wondered what would happen to her now that her grandmother had gone.
* * *
Hannah was still in Vienna. Sandy Hepburn wrote to her via London and also to Adam in Canada to tell them about their mother’s death. Adam wrote back quickly and offered to take Lark to stay with his family, for he had married a Canadian girl and they had a young son.
The Hepburns held a family conference to discuss what should be done.
‘She’d be better off with Adam in Canada, I’m sure of that,’ said Sandy’s eldest son John, who had not been impressed by what he’d seen of Hannah.
‘But we can’t send her there till we hear from her mother. We’ll have to wait a little while longer,’ protested his stepmother.
In the meantime Lark stayed with them, but every day she walked back to the cottage and wandered through its rooms, examining everything minutely, dusting her grandmother’s ornaments and plucking the weeds in her beloved garden. Aylie’s savings, the cottage and everything in it had been left to Lark and when she was told this, she said to Sandy, ‘I want to keep it just like it is now.’
To her friend Sim, who was very gentle towards her that summer, she said, ‘If I’ve got to go away I want you to look after the cottage for me, Sim. Promise you will. One day I’ll come back and live here.’
They linked little fingers as they had done since they were very small and he gave her his solemn promise to look after Aylie’s home.
A month after her mother had been buried in the Cannon grave in the abbey grounds, Hannah arrived in a smart gig driven by the livery man from Melrose. She looked exotic and Continental as she swept into the Hepburn farmhouse, perfunctorily kissing the women and charming the men.
‘I came as soon as I got your letter,’ she told Sandy. ‘I was broken-hearted to hear about my mother. You say it was very sudden – I hope she wasn’t ill for long.’
‘She was never ill at all. If she did feel unwell she never mentioned it. She just dropped dead,’ said Sandy.
Hannah wiped her eyes with a handkerchief trimmed with lace and said, That’s the way she would have wanted it. But what about poor little Lark, she must have taken it hard?’
Mrs Hepburn, a tender-hearted woman, nodded. ‘Poor little thing, she did take it very, very hard. And she’s been so quiet since it happened, not her usual self at all, that we’re
all quite worried about her. Your brother Adam wrote and said he wanted her to go to Canada but we thought you should make the decision yourself.’
‘But of course she must come with me,’ said Hannah. ‘I couldn’t bear to send her away to Canada. I’d never see her again. No, I’ll take her with me, she’s big enough to cope with London now.’
* * *
Her misery was totally engulfing. It made her grow thin and dimmed her golden hair. When her skin took on a glossy waxen pallor even Hannah began to notice that her daughter was ill and heart-breakingly unhappy.
‘What does she do with herself all day?’ she asked her friend Bella, who was married now to Bill, the landlord of a busy tavern called the Queen’s Head in a Spitalfields alley. Hannah and the child had been lodging with Bella, whose dimpled, motherly arms often engulfed the white faced Lark in a sympathetic hug.
‘She helps me in the kitchen sometimes but then she just wanders off. I’ve seen her beneath the tree in that little churchyard up the lane. She sits there staring into space…’ Bella said in a doleful voice, for she was sorry for the child. Lark was so obviously out of place in the city that she made Bella, a country-born girl herself, remember what it was like to yearn for green fields when you are shut up in London slums.
Hannah had no such memories and she shrugged. ‘She misses her grandmother. That’s what’s wrong, she’s just getting used to the idea that she’s dead. They were too close. I suppose I shouldn’t have left her there so long. She’ll get over it though.’
Bella nodded. ‘You must be a bit of a stranger to the kid right enough. She doesn’t know you, really. It’s very lonely for her here.’
Hannah was busy, gathering up her coat and a bundle of papers in preparation for yet another meeting with her revolutionary friends. In a cheerful voice she repeated, ‘Yes, she’ll get used to it, just keep an eye on her for me, Bella, will you?’
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