Gran told tales on winter nights of her young life, for she’d been brought up on one of the grand ducal estates where whole families served as housemaids, farm workers, ghillies, shoemakers, wheelwrights and skilled craftsmen. The large estates had their own schools and churches, and the practising faith of the landed family they served became the faith of the estate workers. Gran had seen it as a form of slavery. It was an enclosed life and servant families had little contact with the wider outside world. Gran, like Flora, had been a painfully shy child who was given to occasional outbursts of bravery or rebellion. ‘Besides,’ she once said in a rare attempt at explaining her own actions, ‘we Scots dinnae forget old alliances and allegiance, nor oor enemies. The family I worked for was a branch of the Campbells and I’m a Macdonald.’
Flora had said, ‘I think you were brave to run away.’
‘Aye,’ Gran went on. ‘Watch your back when a Campbell comes offering friendship. I ran away at fifteen when I was told the history of the massacre at Glencoe.’ She cackled with laughter. ‘Sounds silly, I ken. But I had five years of working life on the estate behind me and I’d had enough.’
Gran had climbed the wall and run away to find work on a little hill farm where, later, she married the old farmer. After he died, leaving her with a son to rear, Gran carried on – as she was doing still, fifty years after her small rebellion.
‘I want to help.’ Flora squatted down and said, ‘Let me do that.’ Gran waved her away. ‘Don’t dirty your school clothes, lass. I’m nearly done.’
Flora stood. ‘I’ve been a burden to you, haven’t I?’
Gran said softly, ‘You’re my pride and joy. I lost my son and your mother. And I never want to lose you. My own flesh and blood.’
Gran had never said anything like that before. What she usually said was that blood was thicker than water and families must cling together.
‘I want to make your life easier,’ Flora said. ‘But if I don’t earn money I can’t help. And if I go into service I’ll never be a singer. You only get Sunday afternoons off at the big house.’
Gran stopped twining the netting. ‘There’s plenty work here. Ye’ll be a help. No regular money, mind, but you can keep on with Miss Whitehead. Tell those teachers that they can’t force you.’
‘Can’t they?’
Gran was breathless from her exertions. She stopped twining for a minute and looked at Flora, her eyes full of sadness. ‘I worry about you, lass. You cannae go through life being obedient. There’s plenty will tell ye what to do. Plenty as’ll give orders. You need courage to make your ain choices.’ She went back to her task, saying, ‘It’s dark. Run back. Set the table. I’ll be nae mair than ten minutes.’
Gran didn’t come back. A sobbing Flora found her, lying still and cold, the twine in her clawed hand where she had clutched it to her chest in the last agonising throes of what the doctor said was a massive seizure.
And Gran’s advice could not be taken. Flora had no choice. The few acres of farmland and their cottage were rented and she was too young to have charge of an agricultural tenancy. The land reverted to the master of the estate and after that the authorities took care of everything. They sold Gran’s sheep and hens. They sold her furniture, they emptied her penny bank savings book, to pay for the burial. And then they sold Flora, or so she believed.
Here in the waiting room at the Haddington courtroom she could have cried thinking about what had become of her. She had never done wrong in her life until they – the authorities – had told her they had no choice but to place her with an ironmonger as part-time schoolgirl and maid-of-all-work.
No girl would have stayed with that disgusting old man, who demanded that she went to school only two days a week and on the other days worked in his shop from morning until night. One night he tried to creep into her bed, saying she should not have left her bedroom door ajar, in invitation. Where was the justice in being brought before the court for running away from such a man?
Gordon looked sternly at the girl in front of him. She’d be a real Scottish beauty one day; she had the height and colouring and a proud way of holding herself, standing before him with shoulders back and chin held high. He said, ‘Do you know that vagrancy is a criminal offence? You were found sleeping on a park bench. We cannot have young people living rough on our streets. Why did you run away, Flora?’
The girl made no answer. She was fighting back tears, biting her full lower lip. He said, more gently this time, ‘If you have anything to say in explanation, then you must do so now.’ He waited a few seconds. Then, ‘Are you prepared to return to your employer? I see that he is willing to take you back.’
‘I’m not going back to that old devil …’ she began agitatedly.
‘Respect the rules of the court,’ the court officer said. ‘Address your replies to “Your Honour”.’
Gordon knew that if he were to speak to her in a fatherly way – and this course was open to him, the lass might tell him what had gone wrong. But even if he did, there was no alternative employment he could offer. She had no parents and no home. He must find a safe place for her. Didn’t she know that there were dole queues at every labour exchange and that skilled men, too proud to sign on for help, walked miles from the villages to Leith Docks, desperate to get a few hours’ work so they could feed their families? The girl was lucky to have employment and a roof over her head. Three years of administering justice to juveniles had taught him that no matter what one did with a girl who preferred life on the streets to respectable employment, once on the downward path, in no time at all she’d be in the gutter.
He said, ‘You should be receiving an education. I think it is best that we send you to the industrial school.’
‘Don’t send me to the reformatory.’
Before she could be reprimanded again, Gordon said, ‘Dr Guthrie’s has a fine reputation for reclaiming wayward Christian souls. You will have daily lessons and be trained for a life in domestic service or laundry work. You’ll be fed, clothed, housed and obliged to attend church. I am giving you a chance. Two years in Dr Guthrie’s establishment will make an honest girl of you.’
Flora drew in breath very sharply, her shoulders sagged, and with tears streaming down her face and her self-control broken she said, ‘I am honest. I’ve done nothing wrong. I can work. Don’t lock me up, sir. Give me another chance. Please … Please … your Honour.’
Tears made Gordon feel inadequate. He could not deal with emotional women or girls and he never again wanted to pass sentence on youngsters. Most of the children he had dealt with today would not be in court if they had good homes; fathers to guide and protect them. He looked kindly at the orphan girl who stood, terrified, before him, and said, ‘I wish there were more I could do for you.’ Then he nodded to the court officer, who took her by the arm and led her away.
At the Ingersley estate’s South Lodge, Andrew Stewart, seventeen years old and built like a man twice his age, lay asleep in bed. He was six foot four, with laughing brown eyes, dark curly hair and a wide, firm mouth that broke into a smile as Ma came to his room to wake him before she went to work in the big kitchen.
‘Five o’clock, Andrew.’ She drew back the curtain and tripped over the Sherlock Holmes novel that was on the floor. ‘What a laddie,’ she laughed. ‘Isn’t farming enough? You don’t still want to be a detective?’
Andrew put a tanned arm across his eyes to shut out the light. ‘All right, Ma.’ He’d have another five minutes. He didn’t have to be at the field until six.
Ma said, ‘If you want something hot, I’ll be cooking for the men up at Ingersley. But there’s bread and cheese and hard-boiled eggs.’
Andrew owed his strong body to three years’ labouring and his robust constitution to Ma’s cooking of the good, plentiful food that came from the estate farm, Ingersley Mains. The estate farms of the great houses in this part of Scotland traditionally took the name of the estate followed by ‘Mains’, just as their counterparts elsewhere would
be known as ‘Home Farm’. Andrew’s ma was employed as cook for Ingersley House, not Ingersley Mains, which was run by a manager, but she helped out at hay-making and harvest, cooking for the hired men.
Now Andrew sat up and pulled a pained expression to make Ma smile. She was forty years old, the best little mother a lad could have, the widow of a fisherman Andrew hardly remembered – and here she was at five o’clock in the morning, her brown eyes clear and bright and her pretty face cheerful as if she hadn’t a care in the world. Other women would be worn down with the amount of work Ma tackled, for she had only two kitchen maids to help her cook for the Campbell family, visitors and staff.
He pulled the sheet up to cover his broad, hairy nakedness, because Ma thought it more seemly for a young man to wear a nightshirt. Then he grinned. ‘You work too hard. The Campbells ought to get more staff.’
Ma would be doing all the cooking for the next several weeks, while a gang of itinerant Irish reapers were crammed ten to a room in the nearly derelict Dower House. She was up at five o’clock, making breakfast for twenty hungry men and toiling to keep up the high standards of the dining room. And all for a pittance and the rent-free house. Andrew wanted an easier life for his ma.
Ma said, ‘We manage, son. Their money’s all gone. I don’t mind any of it. I’m used to hard work.’ She was still smiling as she added, ‘Don’t fall asleep again. I’m off.’ He heard her going down the oak stairs, her shoes clattering on the tiles in the hallway.
Andrew wanted to get Ma out of here, wanted independence for them, but he’d never earn enough as a farm labourer. And he had a terrible pride in his own worth. If he worked himself to death it would not be as anyone’s paid hand. It would be because the land he worked belonged to him. A man could raise a family and have a happy, satisfying life if he emigrated to Canada where virgin land was being given away to those who were prepared to clear and work it. Ma would not do it. She said he’d marry, and why would a wife want her mother in-law living with them? Besides, she said, she would not leave because ‘I belong here. We have a roof over our heads and work to do. Many haven’t. And since young Lady Campbell’s accident, they need me.’ Sir Gordon’s wife had been thrown from her horse a few months ago.
Andrew pointed it out to her. He said, ‘The Campbells give us work, and a roof over our heads, but they don’t own us body and soul.’
‘They own our time if they pay our wages. I never had much schooling. I wasn’t trained for anything. If we didn’t have the Campbells we’d have nothing.’ Ma, exasperated when he talked this way, would add, ‘Know your place, Andrew. Show respect.’
He’d answer, ‘I have self-respect. I won’t be subservient.’
Ma said, ‘Nobody’s subservient now. The old order went with his father’s death.’
This was true. Gone with the loss of their wealth and the death of Sir Gordon’s father was an army of servants and a whole way of life for many families who’d been employed on the estate. Ma would remind him, ‘the Commander’ – though he’d left the sea three years ago, Sir Gordon was still referred to by his naval title – ‘says the workers are worthy of their hire. He said it when his father died. The Commander said, “My wife and I do not expect servitude. Respect, yes. You for us and us for you.” That would never have been said by his father.’
‘Aye! When they sacked the workers they had enough money to have gas and electricity brought here. That saved them a good few wages. No lamps to trim every day. A big gas cooking range.’
Ma ignored this. She said, ‘And Lady Campbell – look what she’s done for the servants. She gives us a full day off every week. And she’s put a piano in the servants’ hall.’
‘Aye. An old one that’s not been tuned for years and can only be played after nine o’clock at night if the work’s all done.’ All the same, he acknowledged, the new order, espoused by the Commander and Lady Campbell, had led to a relaxing of the old master-and-servant system. Lady Campbell, before the riding accident that had fractured her skull and nearly blinded her, had given hours of her time to teach Andrew chords on the piano and show him how to read music. But though Sir Gordon Campbell talked in naval terms of all hands on deck and pulling together, he, the Commander, was still master and Andrew and Ma were servants. The old order was that servants who didn’t toe the line could be turfed off the estate, thrown out of their tied cottages. The three-year-old new order had not yet been tested by Andrew or Ma.
Ma never stepped out of line. Ma was dutiful and loyal, and when Lady Campbell’s younger sister Ruth made ever more demands of her, she said no more to Andrew than, ‘She has a right to ask.’ And once, ‘She’s not as gentle and soft as her sister. Lady Campbell’s a stricken woman. Ruth Bickerstaffe has determination. It’s what her ladyship needs.’ Ruth Bickerstaffe, though only twenty-seven, was driven, Andrew sensed, by a thirst for power, not sisterly love. He had seen how she whipped her horse. Andrew would not trust Ruth Bickerstaffe with an animal, let alone her invalid sister. But he would not upset Ma by giving his private opinion of their bosses.
It was half past five when he woke again. He threw himself out of bed, put on his vest and moleskin working trousers and tied the laces of his work boots tight about the trouser bottoms, so no seeds or tiny thunder-bugs could get inside his socks and irritate his feet.
Into his pockets he stuffed cheese and hard-boiled eggs and he ate his bread on the run. The labourers were not allowed to cut across the park but he would not be seen and it would save a few minutes. The sun warmed his face, the air was clean, cool and invigorating and the dewy grass squeaked under his boots as he ran swiftly and quietly around the great beeches, elms, oaks and ornamental trees of the parkland. It was good to be young and alive and have the blood singing through his veins on such a morning. So that nobody would know he’d overslept again, he would cut round the back of the dairy cottages and hop over the beech hedge on to the track. He might even arrive before the Irish gang came up after breakfast.
He was there. He slowed to a walk, hidden by the herd of Jersey cows that were lowing softly in the holding yard, waiting their turn to be milked. He crept past the milking parlours, bent double so the milkers wouldn’t see him, and round behind the empty, swilled-out dairy where the milk would be brought in half an hour. Suddenly, to his alarm, he saw Mike Hamilton, the manager of Ingersley Mains, come out of the front door of his farmhouse, which faced the dairy buildings. Andrew had not been seen. He pressed his back against the wall until Mike Hamilton went into the dairy. He’d be checking that everything was in order, hoping to catch some poor beggars and dock their wages for an infringement of his endlessly revised rule book. Andrew himself could lose a morning’s pay if he were late.
He flattened himself against the wall and sidled towards the open door. If he could get past Hamilton’s gimlet eyes, he’d make a dash for it across the doorway to the beech hedge barely thirty yards away. He edged closer, and then he heard them – Hamilton and Lady Campbell’s sister, Ruth.
It was cool and dark in the dairy with the shutters closed against the early sunlight. Ruth Bickerstaffe waited, a few feet back from the door, her small hands clenched into fists in the pockets of the long brown cardigan she wore over a silk shirt that was tucked firmly into riding breeches. Her bobbed golden hair fell in soft waves across her heart-shaped face and the pupils of her round blue eyes dilated as they adjusted to the darkness. She was aware of her good looks and aware that her delicate appearance masked a steely determination. She saw it as her strength that she was seldom opposed. Most people eventually bent to her will; saw things her way. Today she was set on showing Mike Hamilton that he was no match for her.
She heard footsteps. They paused then started again, heavier this time, and in he came, quick and furtive, before he stopped in his tracks, seeing her. Her pulse quickened, as it always did when she was near this dark, swarthy man of thirty-two. He had the brooding manner of intelligent, uneducated men, but the greater part of his attraction for Ru
th was that he was a natural athlete – the sort of man you’d put on to a horse and he’d ride, or drop into the sea and he’d swim – confident in his mastery of his own body and, as Ruth knew, sure of his mastery of hers. But though their affair was only three months old, it was high time he knew that his power over her began and ended in the bedroom.
‘What the devil?’ he said. ‘What are ye doing here at this hour? Surely Elizabeth needs you?’
A suffocating tide of jealousy swept over her. Elizabeth, Elizabeth. That was all she had heard all her life. Her beautiful, sweet-natured sister, Elizabeth. Her sister’s looks and compliant nature had brought to her all of life’s prizes, even marriage to the heir to a Scottish estate. Ruth had never come close to Elizabeth, not in anyone’s eyes – their father’s or their brothers’ – even though Ruth knew herself to be prettier, cleverer and two years younger than her sister. In Cheshire, where their wealthy, mill-owning father had bought a small estate and brought his family up in grand style, the Bickerstaffe girls had had no hope of marrying into the minor aristocracy. Father’s unpolished manners and new-money tastes saw to that.
Then, when Ruth was eighteen and Elizabeth twenty, a young naval officer, Gordon Campbell, a friend of a member of the hunt, arrived on the scene. He was handsome, rich and would inherit a title. He was a landowner in Scotland, where social divisions were differently defined: one was born either serf or master it appeared to Ruth. English affectations, the behaviour of the Cheshire county set, could have no significance in Scotland – in fact, such things were despised.
An introduction to the Bickerstaffe girls at the Cheshire hunt ball – though Gordon was not a hunting man – and he was hooked. His every leave had been spent in Cheshire from then on, and though he showed no preference, Ruth was sure he liked her best. However, he pretended an encompassing interest, inviting their father and eldest brother as well as Elizabeth and Ruth to Scotland. And never had Ruth schemed and plotted as tenaciously as she did when first she set her sights upon a title and the means of acquiring it: Gordon Campbell. The Ingersley estate had not then fallen into disrepair. It was a devastating blow when Gordon married Elizabeth a year after they met.
Flora's War Page 2