by Vicki Delany
I jerked awake as I almost fell off the log. The old woman smiled at me. “Come,” she said, getting to her feet. “Sleep.”
She led the way to a tent. It was very small — cloth bent over branches with an open doorway. She gestured for me to enter and I crawled inside. The floor was soft with straw covered by a sheet, and a pile of blankets was stacked against the wall. I lay down.
“Thank you for your kindness,” I said. “I’ll be off in the morning.”
The blankets were rough wool and smelled of much use and infrequent washing, but they were warm, and I felt safe for the first time in three days.
Whereas I’d fallen asleep sitting up, with a bowl of stew on my lap, now that I was lying down I was awake, watching flames dance against the tent walls, listening to the people talk. They pitched their voices low, but the night air was still, and I could hear. The old man said, “Morning, go to the house and listen. Say nothing about the girl.”
I woke when the first light of the sun touched the tent. I knew where I was right away and what had happened to me. Something was pressed up against my back, and my face almost touched the tent walls. I rolled over and sat up. The tent was full of bodies.
I’d thought all the blankets were for me and had wrapped myself up warmly. I was now aware of the cold and damp under the one shredded covering I’d been left.
“Mornin’,” Moira said. Two brown eyes peered over the rim of her blanket. The covers shifted, and I could see that the rest of the tent was occupied by the younger girls, still sleeping.
We crawled out of the tent and went into the bushes to take care of what needed to be taken care of. The ground was thick with frost, and clouds hung so low I couldn’t see the surrounding hills. “Do you sleep in tents all year?” I asked Moira.
“Aye.”
“Don’t you get cold? What do you do when it snows?”
She looked at me as if that were a very stupid question. “We brush it off, of course.”
When we got back to camp, the adults were up. The old lady, Jean was her name, was stirring the embers of the fire back to life and Yuri, her husband, was lighting his pipe.
The girls came out of their tent and the three young men out of another. The oldest of them, nineteen or twenty perhaps, ran his eyes up and down my body in a way that reminded me of Alistair Forester regarding my mother. I shivered and turned away. Jean handed each of the boys a hunk of bread, and they set off without a word.
If they were going to the big house to ask about me, I did not want to be here when they returned.
But I’d have time for breakfast.
We ate porridge that was not as good as my mother made and bread neither toasted nor served with butter or jam. When I finished eating, I pulled my handkerchief out of my pocket and dapped at my lips once again. It was a nice handkerchief, lovely stiff linen, pure white, trimmed with blue lace, and my name was flamboyantly embroidered in one corner. It had been a birthday gift from Euila, the Earl’s daughter and my school-mate. Euila, I thought, would be shocked to see how filthy it was now.
I was feeling quite grubby after three days and nights in the same clothes, but judging by the garments these people were wearing, they didn’t do laundry all that often.
I put my handkerchief away and got to my feet. “Thank you for your hospitality, sir, madam. I’ll be on my way now.” Where I would go, what I would do, how I would survive, I had absolutely no idea. The Earl, who’d spoken politely to my mother, who’d shared a dram with my father while they talked about salmon in the rivers and stags on the hills and slipped me shortbread from the kitchen, was seriously ill and no longer left the house. The second son, Alistair, was in charge.
Alistair had killed my parents, and he knew I’d seen him do it.
“Sit,” Yuri said. He slurped watery porridge through one side of his mouth while his pipe remained clamped in the other.
“I don’t want to impose.”
“We won’t send ye were ye dinna want ta go, girl. Now sit.”
I sat.
The boys soon returned. The one named Jock, whom I did not care for, thrust a thumb in my direction and said, “The daughter of the house isn’t missing.”
Yuri looked at me. His eyes were covered by a white film, and I wondered how much he could see. Enough, I had no doubt.
“I could have told you that,” I said with a sniff.
“You have a mouth on you, girl,” Jock said.
“Quiet,” Yuri said. “Who’s she then? Dressed like that, speaking like that?”
“We didn’t have to walk far to hear the news,” one of the younger boys said. His eyes bulged as if there were eggs stuffed behind them, but his smile was shy and kind. “Everyone’s talking about it. Fire in a croft on the estate. The groundskeeper and his wife and wee daughter run off. The Earl’s son’s saying MacGillivray was caught poaching to sell for himself.”
Old Yuri stroked his beard and asked me one question only: “What’s your father’s name, girl?”
“Angus MacGillivray,” I replied, lifting my head high. “Our ancestors were at Culloden.”
“Time we were moving on,” Yuri said, and the women and young men and girls rushed to break up camp.
I lived with Yuri and his family for two years. Although Jean was Yuri’s wife, the younger woman, Mary, often slept in his tent. Travellers, I learned, did not bother with the conventions of Scottish society, and things such as marriages were rarely formalized.
Jock and Donald and Davie were the sons of Yuri and Jean. The two little girls were the daughters of Yuri and Mary. Moira was the daughter of Jean’s sister. Her mother was dead and her father in jail.
Yuri and Jean had to be a lot younger than they looked, if their oldest child was not yet twenty. I soon came to realize Travellers led a hard life indeed. They and their parents and their children had been born in a tent in the woods, and they’d lived every day of their lives outside, sun or snow, always on the move as they followed work and the seasons.
The family were plain-featured, with long, strong faces resembling horses, crooked teeth and sallow complexions, either spotty or scarred. They were short and thin, probably due as much to poor diet as to family characteristics. My mother, dressed in her homespun clothes, bending over a peat fire, had been more beautiful than any of the fine ladies from London or Edinburgh who visited the estate, trailing scores of servants and trunks full of good clothes and glittering jewellery. She’d had clear skin, thick black hair, high cheekbones, delicate hands, and dark eyes rimmed with long lashes. I took after her.
Yuri immediately realized that with my plumy upper-crust accent (beaten into me in Euila’s schoolroom) and my looks, I could be profitably put to beg.
It became my job to stand on street corners, looking sad and beautiful, and tell well-dressed passersby my tragic story in my perfect accent. When my beloved father had been tragically killed, his heartless family threw my mother — of whom they never approved, because although she was minor aristocracy, her family was moneyless — into the street. She was dying of consumption, I went on, and had no one but me to bring in money for food and medicine. I would touch my beautiful handkerchief to my eyes and look stoic and brave. When my family was destroyed, I’d been wearing an altered, cast-off day-dress from Lady Forester, which probably cost more than Yuri’s family would see in a year. Jean looked after it with great care and it, along with my handkerchief, was put aside to be used only as my begging outfit. Jock or Donald or Davie would stand on the other side of the road or around the corner in case some well-meaning lady wanted to take me home. I made a lot of money.
Yuri was afraid I’d start taking on their speech, and retribution would be harsh and sudden if I slipped in a word of Scottish or said ye instead of you.
One night, sitting around the fire, watching sparks leap into the trees, I asked Jean if she ever feared the tents would catch fire. Yuri lifted his stick and hit me across the back of the head. I fell to the ground with a cry and he ki
cked me soundly in the ribs.
He didn’t have cause to hit me often, but when he did he made sure never to strike my face. That would be bad for business.
Travelling families generally keep to the same routine year after year, making a circuit of towns, farms, and camping sites. Generations return to the same farms, moving with the seasons, picking berries or harvesting the neeps. When times are good and work finished, they gather at established campsites — dozens of families, maybe hundreds of people — to exchange the news, see new babies and growing children, drink whisky, and sing around the fire in the soft summer light.
Whether Yuri’s family did this before I arrived I do not know, but now they kept themselves apart. We left Skye immediately and spent the winter travelling Scotland. It was hard work, living on the move. It could take hours to put up the tents, as holes had to be dug into the sometimes frozen ground to secure the shelter against the winter winds. The poles were cut from trees, hazel or ash usually, which were able to be bent. I’d lived in a croft house, but I could never get warm enough in the tent. Not once I realized I had to share the blankets with three other girls.
I made enough money for the family over the winter that come spring, they’d been able to buy a strong, healthy horse from a farmer, get rid of the sway-backed nag, and replace the cart with a handsome wagon for the adults and the girls to sleep in. The wagon was a real luxury in more ways than one: Jean and Mary no longer had to walk alongside the cart. They took turns riding in style beside Yuri as he clamped on his pipe and flicked the horse’s reins.
In the world of Travellers we were rich.
In spring, with the horse pulling the wagon containing most of our goods, we walked out of Scotland and headed south through England.
There was little point in setting up near farms and hoping for work in the fields — no English farmer would give me coins because I spoke well and told a sad story — so we camped near the larger towns and cities. While I begged on street corners and one of the boys guarded me, Jean and Mary and the girls would go hawking. Selling things door to door, flowers they’d collected from the fields, trinkets they’d picked up on our travels, objects they’d made, such as scourers for cleaning pots, colourful shawls, or painted wooden decorations. Sometimes they’d read palms or tell fortunes. Yuri and his sons would knock on doors asking for work, things to be fixed, trees to be cut down or trimmed.
At first I thought I would never get over the death of my parents, but as time went on and the seasons changed, and we left behind the harsh beautiful highlands I loved, I found hours could go by without thinking of them. I stopped dreaming every night of Alistair Forester drenched with my mother’s blood. After about a year, Moira told me I was no longer tossing and turning and crying out in fear in my dreams.
I never felt love from my new family. Jean was kind to me, and she fed me and ensured I had a place to sleep, but she never wrapped me in her arms or held me tight. Yuri was quick to discipline me for incidents of what he saw as disrespect or failure to do my job. I was as much a worker for his family as was the new horse, and I received just as much affection. Mary, the younger wife, disliked me intensely and was quick with a punch or kick if I didn’t move fast enough or she thought I was talking back. Only later did I understand she feared that when I got older I would be invited into Yuri’s tent.
Moira and I had little choice but to become friends. Girls of an age surrounded by adults, older boys, and younger girls. But I suspected she was jealous of me and never put my trust in her.
Davie and Donald pretty much ignored me, and I them.
Jock, however, watched me constantly. He was a small man, but he was strong. He’d slap my bottom or make a grab at my breasts, tiny as rosebuds, or grab me around the waist and ask for a kiss and not let go until Yuri growled at him. He pretended, in front of the others, it was all in fun, but I knew better. His laughter was forced and his smile did not reach his dark eyes.
One day he hid in the bushes while I was returning from the privy and jumped out as I passed. He wrapped his arms, strong from hard labour, around me and bent my head for a kiss. When I resisted, he knocked me to the ground with a growl. But he tripped and I was able to get to my feet and flee.
Jean gave me a long look when I came running out of the trees, the back of my dress covered in dead leaves and dirt, followed by a grinning, swaggering Jock.
We arrived in Oxford, and I was sent into town with Jock to do my job while the others made the rounds of hawking and seeking odd jobs. I did particularly well that day and had collected the incredible sum of ten pounds from an elderly don, who was almost brought to tears by my heartbreaking story of indescribable woe. Which I described at great length. I handed over all the money to Jock, as I was expected to, and we made our way out of town toward camp.
As we were passing a pub, Jock shoved me into an alley. I lost my footing and staggered backwards, falling into the dirty ground. Before I knew what was happening, he was on me, one hand reaching up my skirt, clawing at the delicate skin on the top of my legs. His mouth came down hard on mine and his thick tongue thrust between my lips. Something long and hard was pressed up against my thigh and I knew Jock was scrambling to undo his trouser buttons.
I bit down, hard, onto his tongue and felt blood spurt into my mouth. Jock yelled and punched me in the face. Once, twice, three times. Stars moved behind my eyes. I raked my fingers down his face and screamed.
“You there. What do you think you’re doing?”
The weight lifted off me as Jock lumbered to his feet. “Piss off,” he growled.
“I don’t care what you get up to with your whore, but you won’t be doing it next to my premises. Get off with you. Why, she’s just a child.”
The man was very large, red-faced and round-bellied, with enormous white whiskers. He turned to Jock and his face filled with anger. “I’ll have the police on you, lad.” He stepped toward me and held out his hand. “Are you all right, child?” He pulled me to my feet.
I straightened my dress, nodded, and wiped blood from my nose. I said in an accent that was pure crofter’s daughter. “Aye, sir. I thank ye for the kindness, sir.”
“She’s my sister,” Jock said with a growl, “and I don’t need the likes of you interfering if she needs disciplining.”
He grabbed my hand and we ran, the man’s shouts following us.
Once he was sure we were not being pursued, Jock dropped my hand. “Not a word o’ this, you hear?”
I stared into his eyes, black and hard as chips of coal. “I’m not afraid of you.”
“You should be. You will be.”
He left me standing alone on the street corner, my day’s earnings in his pocket.
I made my own way back to camp.
Jean cried out when she saw me. I must have made quite a sight with my face bruised and bloodied, my dress torn and dirty. I said something about a tough trying to take my money, and she dipped a clean rag into the can set to boil for tea and wiped at my face gently.
Yuri asked me where Jock had been while I was being assaulted, and I said I didn’t know. He studied me through milky eyes and a cloud of smoke and read the lie in my face.
I didn’t hear Jock return to camp, but he was at breakfast the following morning. Deep scratches ran down his right cheek, and he blustered about fighting off three men in a pub. An unlikely story, as even I was well aware Travellers were not welcome in pubs. If they did fancy a pint, they were expected to be out by three o’clock when the locals arrived. Yuri said I was to go hawking with the women today and ordered Jock to stay behind once the others had left to find work.
When we returned that evening, Jock’s eye was black and purple and almost swollen shut, and he walked as if his ribs were hurting him. The knuckles on Yuri’s right hand were bruised. Neither man said a word about what had happened, and no one asked.
I was off the street for a week while my bruises faded and the cuts healed over, and I knew Yuri was angrier with Jo
ck at the signs of violence on my face than the attack itself.
From that day on, Jock regarded me with a smouldering anger, but he did not try to touch me again.
Jean took me aside after supper the night of the attack. We went around to the far side of the wagon. She pulled something out of the folds of her dress. It was a knife in a battered leather sheath. “Our Jock is not a good man. He’s my son and I’m sorry, but that’s the way of the world sometimes and there’s nae help for it. You need to watch out for yourself, Fiona. Take this.” She pressed the sheath into my hand. I gripped it, and pulled the knife out slowly. Firelight reflected off the blade. It was very sharp.
“Davie will show you how to use it. Keep it with you always.” Yuri called for tea, and she slipped away.
Davie was as opposite a man from his brother as two people could be. He was shy and spoke in a low voice with his bulging eyes fixed on the ground. He was always kind to me and seemed genuinely fond of his cousin and two half-sisters. He was the youngest and smallest of Jean’s three boys, and the two older ones treated him with a sort of casual contempt; it was not unknown for him to come to meals with a bloodied nose or blackening eye.
He taught me well. How to keep the knife concealed but available instantly when needed; to ensure the sheath was always smooth inside so the blade wouldn’t stick. He showed me how to thrust and how to parry, to stab deep and hard, and to use it to block an incoming blow. After the incident with Jock, Yuri assigned Davie to watch over me while I begged, and we usually stopped somewhere private on the way back for a lesson. The day I accidently cut his forearm, he laughed and said I needed a teacher no longer. I’m sure Yuri knew what was going on, but nothing was ever said between us.
Moira saw the knife when I laid it beside my head at night or took off my clothes to bathe in a summer stream. Like the rest of the family, she said nothing about it. I told the younger girls it was for peeling tatties and neeps.