by Anne Doughty
But even as the thought formed, she had to admit she had felt no such kindly feeling towards her countrymen for some time now. It was certainly not how she felt when she went to the mills and Tom, or one of the other managers had to report yet another fight between the men kicking a ball around in the lunch hour. There was the name calling, the waving of flags, the singing of party songs.
She was sick of it all, but especially of the endless marching columns. Ulster Volunteers and Irish Volunteers. With their belts and bandoliers, backpacks and wooden rifles, tramping across green fields or setting up targets for practise with real rifles.
Thomas would have none of it. Nor would her father. Long ago, they had said no to those who tried to intimidate them and they had both paid for it. Their partnership in the forge had to be ended when the master of the local lodge gave the word they were to be boycotted and their work fell away. Her father had been forced to take a job in Drumcairn Mill, while Thomas struggled on, on his own, making barely enough to keep going until, once again, a home rule bill failed. Then, confident the world would always remain the way they wanted it, the drilling faded away. No, she thought bitterly, no one would ever change in the slightest, minds so firmly made up.
Sarah looked across at Selina as she stood by the graveside, a tall, thin woman, her face lined. Sad, but not bitter. She had said often enough to Rose that what she and Thomas had shared all these years was a unexpected gift. She had not hoped for happiness again after her first husband died. Married to Mary-Anne, Thomas had given up all prospect of joy. But life had been kind. They had found each other.
Like everyone they knew, they’d suffered loss. Little Sophie, bitten by a rabid dog. Thomas’s elder son gone to Canada, a few brief letters, then silence. Selina’s beloved younger sister. But they had had such joy in each other and in their other two children, Isobel and Ned, in Annie’s family and more recently in Robert and Ellen’s.
Sarah felt her shoulders tighten as the chill of the fading afternoon began to eat into her. Aware of a small movement at her side, she glanced up at Alex and saw a strange, pained look on his face. As the rector began the committal, she saw him stand even straighter, as rigidly to attention as if he were on parade.
She’d been surprised when he’d asked for time off to come to the funeral and even more surprised when he asked if he might drive her motor and go via Liskeyborough to collect Sam.
‘I didn’t know you’d even met Thomas,’ she said, when he appeared in her dining room the morning after the news had come.
‘Only once,’ he said, his eyes sparkling with sudden moisture.
She waited, her pen still poised over the papers she’d been working on when she’d heard his gentle tap at the door.
‘When I first arrived in Annacramp, Ned Wylie took me up to Thomas to see if he could give me a job,’ he began. ‘He couldn’t give me a job, but he did what you did,’ he blurted out unexpectedly. ‘He accepted me. He looked at me and would’ve taken me, even if I’d had no name at all,’ he went on, his voice unsteady. ‘As it was, he sent me to your Da. I wish there were more like Thomas and your Da,’ he said, his eyes now glittering with tears.
She stood up and put a hand on his arm.
‘Have you time for a cup of tea, or is Da expecting you back down at Ballievy?’ she asked quietly.
‘No, we’d finished there,’ he said, collecting himself. ‘He said to come up and see what you’d like to do on Friday. Go with them and let me collect Sam or come with me to pick him up. Whatever you want.’
They’d gone into the sitting room, where the morning fire was just beginning to blaze up. She sat down opposite him, studying the familiar face, the unknown young man who had walked into their lives and now was so much a part of the family and her own trusted friend. How long was it now since they’d made their pact?
‘Alex, have you ever regretted leaving Canada?’
‘No, not for one moment,’ he replied firmly.
‘But aren’t there things you miss? People you were fond of or places you liked?’
‘Yes, of course,’ he said cheerfully, as Mrs Beatty elbowed the half-open door and put a tray of tea on a low table between them.
He waited till Sarah thanked the older woman and she’d closed the door firmly behind her.
‘The things I miss most are all things that gave me heart,’ he began, ‘like the great countryside and the colours in autumn and walking out on a summer evening. There were working people like myself I used to talk to and we put the world to rights, as the saying is here, but nothing in Canada ever seemed to be my own. I was only a worker, a piece of human machinery. I’d been imported like a bale of linen. I was useful, but of no relevance to anyone,’ he said calmly, without a hint of bitterness.
‘But if you’d stayed, Alex,’ she began. ‘If you’d married and raised a family …’ she broke off, suddenly wondering why Alex hadn’t found a girlfriend among the spinners and doffers or the various young relatives of the Jackson’s and their niece, Emily.
Alex laughed, so easily reading her thoughts.
‘I have my eye on someone, Sarah,’ he said slowly, ‘but I’m in no hurry. I’ll wait till you say yes to your man.’
‘And what if I don’t?’ she came back at him, without considering very closely what she was revealing.
‘You’d be a fool if you didn’t,’ he said promptly. ‘You were a different woman when you came back from Ashleigh Park. Before you’d even come down the gangplank, I looked up at you and thought That’s it, that’s why that letter to Rose was so different. She’s met someone.’
Sarah smiled ruefully. She’d said very little about Simon Hadleigh to anyone, even her mother, but she had not made it a secret either. Besides, the regular arrival of his letters with their exotic stamps, so prized by her son, was not something she could easily conceal, even if she’d wanted to do.
She suspected that Alex had guessed months ago, when she’d made a plan to go and visit Hannah at Christmas, but this was the first time he’d spoken directly. Yet once again, Alex had sensed what she was thinking before she’d even recognised it for herself.
A handful of small stones fell into the open grave, rattling on the shiny surface of the lowered coffin. She came back abruptly to the present, bowing her head as the rector prayed, the light breeze now flapping the wide sleeves of his vestments.
The mound of earth piled neatly beside the long, raw trench diminished rapidly as two men with gleaming spades refilled the grave, their sleeves rolled up as if it were a summer day. Flowers were spread across the disturbed earth and the tramped grass as the rector walked away and one by one the watchers moved forward to shake Selina by the hand and say the familiar words of comfort.
‘I’m sorry for your trouble.’
Sarah heard the phrase a dozen times before she was blinded by tears, the memory of her own loss suddenly as fresh as it had been that warm August day in the small Quaker burial ground at Moyallen.
She was grateful for the warmth of the house by the forge. In the big kitchen the doors of the stove stood wide open. In the sitting room beyond, tall flames rose from a log fire and reflected in the small panes of a corner cupboard where Selina kept her best china and in the heavily framed portraits of American relatives. In both rooms, extra chairs were set against the walls and a laden table in the kitchen carried refreshments for those, like the Hamiltons, who had come a distance.
‘Ach, d’ye mind the time …’
‘George, how are ye? Sure I haven’t laid eyes on you in years. What way are ye, man?’
‘Ach, she’s rightly considerin’. She always said she’d niver want to see m’father sittin’ in a chair.’
Sarah listened to the voices around her, touched her warm teacup to her ice cold cheeks and then drank slowly, grateful for the conversations that meant she didn’t have to make an effort herself. Her mother was talking to Selina, their heads close together. Sam was shaking hands with Robert’s wife, Ellen, an awkward lo
oking girl whose eyes never settled on the person she was speaking to. She said ‘Pleased to meet you,’ then went on to complain about the cold and how long the rector had kept them standing at the graveside.
‘Have a drop of this, Sarah, it’ll warm you up. You’re lookin’ desperit pale.’
Sarah smiled up at her father. She’d never much liked whiskey but she wouldn’t say no when he was doing his best to do his part, weaving his way through the crowded rooms, a bottle of Bushmills in his hand.
‘Your Ma just told me you used to live opposite the forge,’ Alex said, squeezing past Sam and Ellen Scott to come and stand beside her.
‘Didn’t you know that?’
‘No,’ he said, shaking his head.
Sarah looked at him in surprise. He seemed both agitated and anxious, as if this piece of information was of the greatest importance.
‘Come and I’ll show you,’ she said suddenly, finishing her whiskey. ‘It’ll only take a moment.’
She turned to Sam, spoke a word to him and slipped out of the crowded kitchen into the fading afternoon, Alex close behind her.
‘This way,’ she said, as he paused at the front door, looking down the path to the forge and the lane running on down to the main road.
With the shadows gathering, the long-abandoned house over to their left looked like an overgrown wall, weighed down with ivy and screened by flourishing bushes. As she walked towards it, Sarah saw the thatch had finally fallen in at the far end. The roof of the main room sagged perilously but had not yet given way. She picked up her skirts, strode up to the door, turned the handle and stepped inside.
After the warmth and bright lamplight in the house, the air struck chill, but the smell of damp was off set by the fragrance of a stack of fresh logs piled against the door to the bedroom. She made her way across a pile of iron bars and between a few pieces of old furniture until she stood in front of the empty hearth.
‘Da made this crane,’ she said shortly, leaning forward and drawing the metal arm out from its place. The chain dangling, it swung over the blackened hearth with a muted creak.
Alex’s face was in shadow. He nodded and said nothing, but she could see he was watching her closely.
As she stood there, all she could think of was the summer’s day when she and Sam had ridden over from Richhill Station to visit Thomas. Brilliant light glanced from the rich foliage of high summer and the air was heavy with heat. They’d stood in the sunshine talking to him, and then she’d taken pictures of him and Robert together, working at the bench at the back of the forge where the dim light from the two dusty windows was just enough for an exposure.
Afterwards, they’d come to look at their old home. Sam had cut a spray of roses for her from a bush grown wild in the garden and she’d found the calendar for 1889 still hanging in the washhouse, the last days of their life there, some ten years previously, stroked off one by one in pencil. July 1889. The year of the disaster in which they had not perished.
‘Has Ma told you about the Rail Disaster?’ she asked suddenly.
‘Yes.’
‘And the time Thomas nearly died?’
‘Oh yes,’ he replied, as if it were the most obvious thing that Rose should tell him all the family history.
‘But we were living here then. Didn’t she say?’
Sarah couldn’t imagine how either tale could have been told without mentioning the two-roomed house they’d had to move to when their landlord found the means to serve notice and give their house at Annacramp to his son.
‘Maybe she did, Sarah, but I didn’t make the connection. I thought you’d always lived at Annacramp in that house Ned Wylie showed me.’
‘But why does it matter, Alex?’ she asked gently.
‘Because it’s part of your life, Sarah,’ he answered firmly. ‘We made a promise to help each other two years ago. Don’t you remember? If I don’t know about your past, I won’t be able to understand why you’re the person you are. I’ll not be able to help you the way I want to.’
‘Yes, of course, I remember. But I’m not sure I’ve done very much to help you,’ she said sadly.
‘Oh yes, you have,’ he came back immediately. ‘You took my word. You’ve shared your family with me. You’ve kept my secret.’
Sarah shivered and pushed the crane back into its place. It seemed such a strange thing that it had remained here, exactly where it had always been for the last fifteen years. The whole world had changed for her and for everyone else and yet the crane on which her mother had cooked over the open fire was just as Sam had left it when he pushed it back into its place that glorious summer day.
‘We ought to go back, Alex. Back to the present,’ she said ruefully, knowing now quite clearly there was something in her present she could not bear.
‘You’ve been good to me over my past, Sarah. I’ll do my best to be good to you over your future,’ he said firmly. ‘I think I can see it clearer now after today.’
He held open the door for her and she walked past him out into the dusk. There were times when she couldn’t understand Alex at all, but she had never had any cause to doubt his kindness, his goodwill, or his strange wisdom. He most certainly had kept his side of their pact.
‘Are you foundered with cold?’ John asked, as he and Rose pushed open the door and stepped into their dark, chilly kitchen.
‘No, I’m not that cold, love. You had me well wrapped up in those rugs,’ she replied, dropping her hat on the nearest chair. ‘But I’m cold at heart and so are you,’ she said, looking up at him in the patch of pale moonlight that filtered through the front window. ‘We’ll light the lamps and make up a good fire,’ she went on, putting a match to a single candle sitting ready on the windowsill.
She waited for the flame to steady, then carried it over to the stove so she could see to light the gas lamps.
‘Are you hungry?’
‘No. I can’t say I am,’ he replied honestly. ‘Ach shure I’ve no heart for food. But a mug of tea would go down well.’
‘Come on then,’ she said, encouragingly. ‘You light the paraffin stove and I’ll get the fire going. I’ve plenty of good kindling all ready here in the box and a bit of turf to hurry it up. We’ll have a blaze in no time,’ she went on, rubbing her cold hands together. ‘Keep your coat on for a while till we get some heat. I think we’ll have another frost tonight.’
‘Aye. The sky was very clear coming back,’ he said wearily, making an effort to sound less dispirited than he felt. ‘But there’s a good stretch on the evenings now.’
Rose knelt in front of the stove, piled in two large handfuls of bone dry twigs and arranged slivers of turf around them before choosing small pieces of coal to go on top. The moment she set a match to the twigs they crackled into flame, the small, familiar noise bringing comfort. Moments later, the turf smoked and glowed, filling the room with a perfume that lifted her heart. In all the worst moments of her life, she had tended the fire on the hearth for the sake of John and the children coming in from work, from school, from rain and cold.
She drew in the pungent aroma that took her back to her earliest years and remembered her mother bent over the hearth in the thatched house up in the Derryveagh Mountains. The flames flickered more vigorously. She added larger pieces of turf and more coal. Satisfied it was well alight, she got awkwardly to her feet, her back sore from standing, her body stiff with the cold and the tensions of the day.
‘Away and change your clothes, John,’ she said quietly, as he came back into the kitchen carrying a can of paraffin in case the oil stove might need refilling later. ‘Maybe you’d bring me down that nice wool shawl you gave me at Christmas. It’s in my top drawer.’
She saw the bleak look on his face soften slightly as he turned towards the stairs. It was even colder in the dairy as she filled the kettle to boil it on the gas, so she put the whistle on its spout and shut the door quickly behind her.
‘That’s more like it,’ she said, a little later, as John r
eappeared, his black suit replaced by corduroys, a Fair Isle pullover she’d knitted for him years ago and an old tweed jacket.
She slipped off her best cape, wrapped the shawl round her and poured from the waiting teapot.
‘Ye were right about the fire,’ he said, looking into the dancing flames as he sat down. ‘It would put heart in ye.’
‘Are you very upset about Thomas?’ she began cautiously, as she sipped her tea, the warmth of the fire already thawing out her feet.
‘Ach I am in one way, but not in another,’ he said slowly. ‘Sure we all come to it. He was a good age and didn’t suffer much. I’m more upset about Sarah,’ he said abruptly.
‘Sarah?’ she repeated, completely taken aback.
‘Aye. Sure the wee pale face of her by that graveside. You maybe diden see her, for you were standin’ beside her, but I was across from ye’s after we put the coffin down. I could see her plain. Ach, I’m sure she was sorry about Thomas, but it was beyond that. She looked as if all belongin’ to her was dead, as the sayin’ is.’
Rose shook her head and thought back through the afternoon.
‘You’re right about me not seeing her,’ she admitted. ‘I thought she was steady enough and I had my eye on Selina.’
‘Rightly too,’ he said nodding. ‘But even when we got back to the house, her face was like one o’ those marble sculptures in the church. I gave her a drop o’ whiskey an’ she took it, for all she doesn’t like it,’ he said sharply.
‘It’s only two and a half years since Hugh,’ Rose reminded him. ‘I thought she was much better after her holiday last year,’ she added thoughtfully. ‘She talked about going over to London at Christmas and seemed very keen, but then there was nothing more said about it.’
‘D’ye think there’s anythin’ between her an’ Alex?’
‘Alex?’ Rose repeated, amazed that John should even have thought of such a possibility.
‘Aye. He was watching her all the time,’ he said, nodding his head emphatically. ‘Every time I looked over at her, I saw him looking too. And then they went outside together. An’ she seemed more like herself when they came back.’