The Blacksmith's Wife

by Anne Doughty

  Despite the chill of the grey day, she felt hot and uncomfortable when she eventually got up and started the morning chores. She was so grateful that she didn’t have to spend the day with Mary-Anne on the market stall being helpful to women who counted out pennies and looked at garments they knew they couldn’t afford. It was the only time she’d had a day off from the market stall since they’d first laid out their products, mostly their own work, well over a year ago, not knowing how their plans might succeed or fail.

  Despite a spoonful of the medicinal mixture that John always swore by, her cough was uncomfortable, her mouth dry and her throat rough. She couldn’t face breakfast but drank her mug of tea gratefully.

  ‘Come on, Sarah, this won’t do,’ she said aloud. ‘You’ll have to gather yourself for going to Armagh. You don’t want Jonathan to worry that you might not be feeling well,’ she said to herself. But the thought of getting to her feet, seeing to the fire and preparing the midday meal for Sam and Scottie was intimidating.

  Sometimes you just have to pretend you’re fine when you’re not. It’s a wee bit like a white lie. There’s no badness in it, no intention of deceit, just a kind thought for the other people who might be anxious.

  She smiled to herself. How often her grandmother’s words brought comfort as well as wisdom. She would never deceive Jonathan willingly but with a long journey before him, perhaps another rough crossing, or another night to be spent waiting for a storm to die down before he could even begin his homeward trip, today was not a day for him to be made anxious.

  She gathered herself and struggled through the morning chores. It was just as she was about to go upstairs to wash and change her clothes that she heard a knock at the front door which she had not yet opened.

  As the hammers were ringing out from the forge as usual and it was too early for the postman, she wondered who it could possibly be, but the man who stood there when she opened the door was clearly a messenger. He held in his hand a white envelope, one so familiar that her heart leapt to her mouth. What could possibly be wrong that Jonathan was writing to her when they were due to meet in an hour’s time?

  ‘Is there any reply?’ the man asked brusquely, before she had even opened it.

  ‘Yes, I should think so. Do come in. Would you like a cup of tea?’ she asked, hoping he would say no and she could tear open the envelope and see what the single sheet had to say.

  ‘Aye, well …’ he said, in a tone she had come to understand. It meant yes.

  ‘Do sit down while the kettle boils. I’m afraid it might be a couple of minutes as I’ve just made up the fire.’

  Unable to wait a second longer, she unfolded the sheet and saw the familiar hand, a message clearly written at speed.

  Sarah, my dearest,

  I have just had a messenger from The Retreat telling me that it became clear last night that my wife now has a fever. Their medical man insists I contact anyone I’ve been in touch with. A mere handshake can be enough, he says, with some of the virulent fevers that are spreading apace.

  I kissed you yesterday in ignorance, and you kissed my forehead when I confessed about how I’d got the scratch. Oh, my darling, if I could have infected you unknowingly, my heart shall break. He has suggested that I go home immediately, well-wrapped to avoid any contact with other passengers in a coach, or boat.

  Clearly, we cannot meet. I shall await a note from you impatiently from the present messenger.

  Your distraught friend,

  Jonathan

  ‘You came on the right morning,’ said Sarah, amazed at how cheerful she could sound. ‘There’s still cake in the tin,’ she added encouragingly as she made tea, all the while thinking what she could possibly do to reassure Jonathan.

  The messenger, who had been sitting by the fire, looking round him and whistling soundlessly, perked up and said, ‘Aye, a piece of cake would be very nice.’

  She cut a generous slice, poured his tea and said easily, ‘I’ll just be a minute or two. I need to send a word in reply.’

  ‘Take yer time, there’s no hurry,’ he said, eyeing his plate of cake as she took out her writing materials from the dresser.

  My dearest Jonathan,

  I am so very sorry not to see you this morning, but I’m sure the doctor who visited The Retreat has said the correct thing in urging caution, even if it turns out to be quite unnecessary. I am feeling perfectly well, just so sad we have been deprived of our meeting.

  All I ask is that you take great care of yourself and watch out for any early sign of illness. I shall do the same and we both have good people to look after us should we be unlucky. Never forget what we both agreed once, that strength of spirit can overcome many misfortunes.

  My loving thoughts are with you,

  Sarah

  ‘Here you are,’ Sarah said, trying hard not to cough. ‘I’m sorry to have delayed you, but my friend was worried I might not be well.’

  ‘Sure I’ll tell him you’re the picture of health and gave me cake to my tea,’ he said grinning, as he put the envelope in his pocket.

  ‘What a good idea,’ she said, beaming at him and hoping he would go quickly.

  Moments after she shut the door behind him, the cough that had been threatening for minutes broke surface. She coughed till she was exhausted, and then sank down on the chair by the fire, sweat breaking on her face, her forehead throbbing with pain from the headache that had suddenly recurred. She admitted that she was not well, but at least she could say honestly that it didn’t look to her like fever.

  At mid-morning, when Scottie went to harness Daisy, he came to the door to see if there was anything to go with her, so he could take whatever it might be and find a suitable place to store it under one of the seats in the trap. As he came into the kitchen, he took one look at her, sitting by the fire with her hand to her head, still wearing her morning clothes. He could see she was not well. When she tried to speak to him and was interrupted by a bad bout of coughing, he turned on his heel and went back to the forge.

  ‘Sam,’ he said, as calmly as he could manage. ‘Mrs Hamilton isn’t well and Mrs Halligan is in Armagh. What are we going to do?’

  Sam dropped his hammer promptly and came to the door of the forge where Scottie stood. ‘Is she on her feet?’ he asked.

  ‘She’s sitting by the fire, but she should be in her bed. I’ve never seen her look so bad, an’ she has a cough would deafen you,’ he added, as they walked the short distance across the front of the house to the open front door. They went in to the kitchen together and found she was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Maybe she went out to the privy?’ said Sam steadily, having looked around and listened.

  They waited a few minutes, hoping to hear the distinctive click of the latch on the back door. When another few minutes had passed, they went out through the back door themselves. They found her lying face downwards on the ground.

  It was when Sarah suddenly felt sick that she decided to go out to the privy, but she didn’t actually get there. Every step felt like a major effort, her head throbbing and her cough threatening to erupt at any moment. It was a bout of coughing that confused her. Suddenly, she slipped on a patch of melting ice and felt herself fall helplessly forward. She hit the ground head first, felt the damp, stony surface rough under her cheek and the warmth of blood trickling across her forehead before she passed out.

  ‘She’s hurt herself,’ said Scottie, seeing the blood as Sam dropped to his knees and turned her over. ‘Will I away for the doctor?’

  ‘It might come to that,’ said Sam, as he eyed the gash on her forehead. ‘But we need to get that blood stopped now,’ he went on. ‘Away in and get one of them clean puddin’ cloths from the dresser and soak it in the bucket in the wash house. The colder the water, the better. Use today’s bucket. Wring out the cloth and bring it here, as quick as you can. Have you a clean handkerchief?’

  To Sam’s amazement, Scottie handed him a crumpled but unmarked handkerchief before he ran off
into the house. He used it to wipe away the trickles of blood and then pressed it firmly against the gash itself.

  Sarah couldn’t understand why there was no window at the foot of her bed. There had always been a window there. Then she saw a woman sitting beside her. It was not the woman who had tried to scratch her eyes out. The woman had her head down and was holding her wrist. She was counting quietly to herself as Sarah fell asleep again.

  It was a man’s voice that woke her up. He was standing in front of a window to the side of the bed where she lay, with his back to her talking to someone. She couldn’t make out what he was saying but the woman’s voice was familiar. She just couldn’t put a name to it because her head hurt so much.

  ‘Yes, I think there is concussion,’ he began, ‘but the wound is not very deep. She’ll probably have a headache for a while and may feel sick. Don’t force her to eat but give her plenty to drink and I’ll send you a bottle for the chest: there’s certainly an infection there, but she is well nourished. Unlike most of my patients, she should recover, given time. Now, I must be on my way, I am required at both the workhouse and The Retreat.’

  There were footsteps and other voices and then silence. She found tears streaming down her face. She would never see either of them again. Neither John, nor Jonathan. She would die and leave them both lonely and the woman with the long fingernails would run after her every time she shut her eyes.

  Then, she heard a voice she knew. ‘Come on, Sarah, open yer eyes an’ take a drink of tea.’ She knew then that the woman with the fingernails had run away because she was afraid of Mary-Anne.

  It was three days before Sarah was able to sit up and drink a cup of soup.

  She felt as if she’d been on a long journey and it was only today that she fully recognised Mary-Anne’s room, the one where Jamsey and Billy used to sleep before Annie came here and had her baby.

  Her head still hurt if she thought about anything, but the coughing had eased. She could still taste the medicine in her mouth, though she didn’t remember taking it. It was the same taste as the one John had always sworn by. Looking around her for the first time, she saw the large bottle, half-empty on the windowsill to her right.

  ‘Oh, so you’ve got yer eyes open again, have you? How are you feelin’ the day?’

  ‘What day is it, Mary-Anne?’ she asked, surprised that her voice came out so weakly. It didn’t sound like her at all.

  ‘It’s Monday. Wash day if ye were at home, but it’ll be a day or two yet before you’re going anywhere,’ she added briskly.

  ‘Monday?’ she repeated incredulously. ‘What happened? Have I been here since Thursday?’

  ‘Well, unless you’ve been slipping out when I haven’t been looking, ye’ve been here since Sam and Scottie brought you down with a bump on yer head an’ a cough you cou’d hear in Armagh,’ said Mary-Anne crisply.

  ‘Oh Mary-Anne,’ Sarah gasped, ‘what about the money? All those poor women waiting for money from the stall and me lying here.’

  ‘Aye, ye were talkin’ about them one night and about yer man Jonathan anither. Then I heerd you talkin’ to yer grandmother an’ someone called Helen. Wou’d that be yer friend in America?’

  Sarah realised that Mary-Anne was smiling. She couldn’t think what might have amused her.

  ‘Why are you smiling?’ she asked, a hint of anxiety in her voice.

  ‘I’m smilin’ because there’s not a lot wrong wi’ yer brains if ye can mind about the muney. The next thing you’ll be sayin’ is that yer hungry and cou’d do with a mug of tea,’ she said, leaning forward and giving her a hug. ‘Scottie did the money and he an’ Jamsey got it all out on Saturday, so it was only a day late. It’s only you that’s behind yerself,’ said Mary-Anne, breathing a great sigh of relief.

  If Sarah had a rather vague impression of the first days of New Year 1847, she soon caught up with events in both the local community of Drumilly, as well as events at both Castle Dillon and Armagh as soon as she got back to work. Gales and snow and low temperatures continued through the whole month, there was a backlog of paperwork to be done and although she still got tired very easily and had the remains of a cough, she tackled it as best she could.

  She was so grateful to her friends, not just Mary-Anne who had yet once again sat with her, nursed her and brought her back to herself, but Scottie and Sam who’d taken care of themselves, kept her fire going, made food and even baked bread to await her return home. Going back to work on Wednesday 6th January, she was grateful when her friends at Castle Dillon were glad to see her and simply assumed the snow on Drumilly Hill had made it impossible for her to come sooner.

  But however thankful she was for her own well-being, she saw with increasing sadness the enormity of need in the wider world. Fever was now rampant, not only in the overcrowded workhouses, but in the countryside as well, cutting through swathes of poor, half-starved people, their numbers increased yet further by absentee landlords who used their unpaid rents as an opportunity to secure their eviction.

  She asked herself what possible hope there was for families with no income, without either food or shelter, in areas where remoteness or indifference meant there was no help to be had readily at hand.

  As she opened letters and forwarded abstracts to Sir George who was still in Dublin, she searched in vain for some better news, but there was none to be found: neither in rural districts like Tartaraghan, a mere few miles away, nor in the southern and western counties of Ireland, where, unlike in Ulster, there were few landlords on the ground. There, only the local clergy, with limited means themselves, tried to help the suffering population by writing letters asking for help, many of which were ignored.

  The only piece of good fortune that came to help her was when she found that Jonathan had indeed crossed the Irish Sea on New Year’s Eve, but that was the last sailing for almost a week due to sustained westerly gales, probably blowing as vigorously across Yorkshire as on the Irish Sea itself.

  After the memorable crossing in December, which Sarah was sure he would never forget, he would be only too well aware of the effect of bad weather on the post. In fact, when a cluster of letters arrived in the middle of January, she discovered that a lack of letters from her had only just begun to trouble him when the first one she had written arrived some ten days after he’d sent his messenger to her.

  With the roads so very bad, Sarah solved the problem of going to work by travelling in the middle of the day, if there’d been another fall of snow overnight. With the morning’s partial melting the road was passable with care, Daisy now adept at ‘picking her steps’, as Scottie called it. Sarah then took up Bridget Carey’s suggestion that she stay at Castle Dillon one or two nights at a time, depending on the weather and making use of one of the small guest rooms which Bridget had prepared for her.

  However much she would have preferred to sit by her own fireside, she was able to use the overnight stays to catch up on the piles of letters that had accumulated in her absence and to write letters of her own, not only to Jonathan but to her other friends as well.

  Annie and James were so delighted to see her back. She made time to visit them in their room in the early evening after supper in the servants’ hall, before she went back to work in the study. She got to know Beth, the good-hearted girl from the workhouse, whose task it was to care for little Patrick during the day when Annie and James were both at work.

  She was pleased to find that James was coping well with his new household duties which involved stocktaking and accounts for Bridget. When he asked her for help with account keeping, she was delighted by his new-found confidence and more than willing to spend a part of each evening teaching him. He was an able pupil.

  Mary-Anne and Sarah agreed that if she wanted nothing said about either her accident or the chest infection, it was a simple matter to ask Scottie and Sam, Billy and Jamsey to say nothing.

  Sarah was relieved. If Jonathan need not be told, then it was one less anxiety for him to carry.
He already carried so much without complaint, from the challenges of his work as a manufacturer, albeit shared with his brothers, to the research he had committed himself to on behalf of the Quaker Central Relief Committee.

  Their letters were open and honest about all that happened to them, but Sarah was sure her grandmother would approve of this single omission. Let Jonathan have the comfort of knowing she was well without reminding him of that unhappy day when he’d had to send her a messenger and depart without a proper goodbye.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Sarah opened her eyes suddenly and saw a bright line of light where the curtains on the south-facing window had not been closed carefully enough the previous evening. She smiled. It often happened when she was tired out, the candle flickering in her other hand, the window completely black unless there was a moon reflecting off the snow.

  What a difference it made to getting up in the morning when there was sunlight. She got out of bed, wrapped the extra rug from the foot of the bed round her shoulders and tramped across the wooden floor to stand on the rag rug she’d made in her first year as a bride in her new home.

  She drew the curtains back, looked in amazement at green fields and trees dripping in the sunlight. The last day of January and there was no new snow in the night. Clearly it was not so cold, for only in a thaw would there be jewels on the trees.

  She felt her spirits rise as she pulled on her morning clothes: a heavy skirt and a very old silk blouse, many years ago a Sunday best, now worn and much-mended but treasured for its continuing warmth under a knitted woollen top.

  Saturday and no Castle Dillon today, her work all up-to-date, she could do some of the things she only thought about when what had to be done was only too obvious. And then, of course, it would be light much longer than last Saturday. She’d not have to remember to get in the wood or the water, before the day ended in darkness as early as four o’clock.