As they drew near, Nell stopped and looked about her. ‘If I hadna seen it with ma own eyes, I wouldna have believed it,’ she murmured shaking her head. ‘There’s hardly anyone here.’ Puzzled, Jeannie too glanced around. To her, there seemed to be a great many girls here – and all waiting for work.
‘In my day,’ Nell was saying. ‘The place was just seething.’ She waved her arm in a broad arc to encompass the area where the wooden troughs – the farlanes – stood awaiting the day’s catch of fish and where the herring girls would stand at their work for the next twelve hours or so. Beyond them were row upon row of empty barrels where a few men – the coopers – stood waiting for the work to begin. They all seemed to be dressed in a similar fashion: open-necked shirts, the sleeves rolled up above their elbows; braces, holding up their trousers, covered by a waistcoat. Sturdy boots and a cloth cap completed their workaday attire.
As Nell seemed to be lost in her own memories, Jeannie squared her shoulders, lifted her chin and marched up to the nearest group. ‘’Mornin’.’
The girls glanced her up and down and then nodded in return to her greeting.
‘D’you ken if there’s work to be had?’
‘Gutting or packing?’ was the brief question.
‘Either,’ Jeannie said.
One of the girls jerked her thumb over her shoulder. ‘See Billy McBride. He’s the foreman. He’ll know.’
Jeannie turned back to Nell Lawrence. ‘He is here. Somewhere.’
The woman blinked and, pulled out of her reverie, gaped at Jeannie for a moment. ‘Och aye, aye,’ she said, suddenly remembering exactly what she was doing here. ‘I thought he would be, but it’ll be finding him that’s the problem.’ Nell chuckled. Then she glanced at Jeannie and pointed to her hair that curled waywardly on to her forehead, however tightly she tied it back beneath the triangle of cloth. ‘Tuck your hair well oot of sight, hen. Billy’s one of the old fishermen. He doesna trust red hair.’
Jeannie smiled and did as she was bade. She had every respect for the superstitions of the fisherfolk. Maybe, she thought sadly, I brought my own father bad luck when I went down to the harbour to wave him off that last time. The thought hurt, but she swallowed her private feelings, lifted her chin with a tiny gesture of determination and followed Nell.
They wandered amongst the throng asking, ‘Billy McBride?’
A shake of the head, a shrug, and ‘I havena seen him,’ until one girl said, ‘He was here a minute ago. Och, there he is.’
Jeannie looked where the girl pointed, but could see no one. Nell, however, threaded her way through and Jeannie followed in her wake until she came up behind Nell almost bumping into the woman as she stopped suddenly.
‘Well, well, Nell MacDonald. Yer’ve no’ altered a scrap, young Nellie.’
Jeannie watched the woman’s shoulders shake and heard her laughter. ‘You auld rascal, Billy McBride. You’re still a right blether.’
Over Nell’s shoulder Jeannie saw the man they were seeking. No wonder, she thought, he had been so difficult to find. Whereas on her first sight of Nell Lawrence’s husband, Jeannie had thought him the biggest man she had ever encountered, now she found herself facing perhaps the smallest man she had ever seen. He was no more than four feet tall and whilst at the present moment he was greeting Nell like a long-lost friend, Jeannie could see that the man’s sharp, beady eyes would miss nothing and that his mouth, at the moment stretched wide in a smile, was capable of contracting into a hard, thin line.
The girls who mingled around them were certainly in awe of this little man, for their jobs depended upon his say-so.
He would have hired the teams in Scotland, bringing them down the east coast, probably even arranging their travel and accommodation, keeping the girls tightly under his control. It was doubtful that there would be any work to be had, Jeannie realized with a sinking heart, yet he was her only hope, so she smiled at him and stood meekly behind Nell whilst the older woman chatted and almost flirted with her old friend.
Then his glance came beyond Nell to appraise Jeannie. ‘And who’s this, then, Nell? Your lass, is it?’
Nell shook her head. ‘No, Billy. I have a daughter – and a son – but they’re working. No, this is Jeannie Buchanan. She arrived last night and . . .’ Nell’s swift glance at Jeannie silently asked that she should not recount the circumstances of how she came to meet the Lawrence family. ‘And,’ Nell went on, ‘I was wondering if you could find work for her.’
‘Och, well now, Nell, that might be difficult.’ The man stroked what looked like a three-day growth of grey stubble on his chin. ‘The girls are already in teams, ye ken.’
‘Aye, but if you could, Billy . . .?’ Nell left the plea hanging.
Now the man addressed Jeannie. ‘Gutting or packing, lass?’
‘I dinna mind. I’ve done both.’
‘Your first time in England, is it?’
Jeannie was obliged to nod, ‘Aye, but,’ she added swiftly, ‘I went to the Shetlands last year.’
‘Well, you’re tall enough to do the packing, but, as it happens, it’s a gutter we’re short of. The lass cut herself badly and it’s gone septic. She didna bind her fingers properly. Now – let me see your hands.’
Smiling with a sense of pride, Jeannie obediently held out her strong hands for inspection, knowing that the tiny faint scars on her fingers were her passport to employment. Taking them into his own, he turned her hands over, his glance keen and knowledgeable. Jeannie knew that the foreman would be able to tell, just from looking at them, if she were speaking the truth. If she were a practised gutter, Billy McBride would know.
Then Billy looked up into her face, staring at her, shrewdly assessing her character. Her clear green eyes returned his scrutiny steadily and she allowed her mouth to curve in the hint of a smile, not so much as to be thought too forward, but just enough to give a small sign of self-confidence in her own ability. She was dressed like all the other girls mingling on the dockside and now as a final proof, if proof were still needed, from her pocket she pulled out the binders for wrapping around her fingers to protect them from the sharp gutting knife.
The man was nodding. ‘You’ll do, lass. Shall you be following us down to Yarmouth?’
There was the only slightest hesitation before Jeannie said, ‘Aye,’ but it was enough for the man to glance sharply at her once more. ‘I need to be certain, Jeannie.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Jeannie said swiftly, but Billy McBride was still not wholly convinced.
‘Some man here?’ he probed bluntly.
If her heart had not been so heavy within her, Jeannie would have laughed out loud. She swallowed and, with a fleeting glance towards Nell, who was quietly watching and listening, said, ‘Only my father.’ As she said the words, she nodded seawards, towards the homecoming fleet.
‘Och, I ken.’ The man smiled now, satisfied.
It was not that she deliberately intended to mislead the foreman, who, though brusque in his manner, seemed fair enough, but Jeannie found it difficult to confide in anyone.
As he raised his voice and shouted to two girls standing together, binding each other’s fingers, ‘Flora, Mary, you’ve got a new gutter . . .’ Jeannie lifted her head, smiled and moved forward to meet her new workmates.
‘See you tonight, hen,’ Nell called after her and Jeannie turned, waved and said, ‘Thanks, Mrs Lawrence.’
Their glances held each other’s for a moment as the older woman said softly, ‘Thank you, Jeannie Buchanan.’
Four
The organ music seemed so loud. It reverberated through Robert’s head, louder and louder, until he wanted to put his hands over his ears and run out of the church.
‘You look awful. For God’s sake don’t pass out on me again,’ Francis hissed at his shoulder.
‘Thanks,’ Robert muttered wryly. ‘You do wonders for a chap’s morale. Besides,’ he added morosely, ‘it’s you I’ve to thank if I do look a mess.’
To the
unobservant eye, Robert would have looked no different from what the guests might be expecting to see in a nervous bridegroom. Both he and the best man, indeed all the gentlemen of the wedding party including Edwin as usher, their father and the bride’s father, were attired in black suits and waistcoats, with silk ties around stiff, winged collars. They each wore highly polished black shoes and white spats and carried a top hat and white gloves. A snowy handkerchief, neatly arranged in the top pocket, and a white carnation in the lapel completed the look and if the bridegroom’s face was pale, his dark brown eyes shadowed, then they would say fondly that it was the occasion overwhelming the young man of only twenty.
But his brother was not so sympathetic. ‘Serves you right,’ Francis retorted. ‘I can’t abide a chap who can’t hold his liquor.’
Robert glanced sideways at him, but the darting pain behind his eyes made him turn his head back to face the altar.
‘Nor,’ Robert heard Francis snigger, ‘a chap who can’t rise to the occasion when he has a member of the fair sex – er – just handed to him.’
‘Oh, for goodness sake, Francis. Don’t be so crude. Not here, of all places.’
But his elder brother had no reverence in his being and Robert regretted having asked him to stand as his best man. In fact, now he came to think of it, he had not himself asked Francis nor even wanted him. It had all been taken for granted, all taken out of his hands by his parents and his future in-laws.
‘Of course your elder brother must be your best man,’ their mother had decreed and there had been an end of it.
He wondered if the fact that Francis, the first-born son and heir, had been the only one of the three Hayes-Gorton brothers to be sent away to boarding school, had set him apart. Robert, three years younger than Francis, and then Edwin, born a year after Robert, had both attended the local Grammar School as day pupils.
‘I will not allow you to send all my sons away,’ their mother had insisted.
But had Francis’s time away from home given him his supercilious manner? And had he learnt there, too, from unsuitable peers, the dissolute life he now led? Francis had stated, with such determination that allowed no argument from their parents, that he had no intention of marrying. With a rare flash of insight into his own character, he had said, ‘I suppose I could be quite fond of Louise, but I would not be cruel enough to marry her. My way of life would break her heart in a couple of weeks.’
And so Samuel’s desire for a grandson had become a duty for the second son to fulfil.
Robert had been swept along on the tide of his family’s machinations and in this bemused state he found himself standing before the altar in St Michael’s Church at eleven o’clock on the morning of the fourth of September in the year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-four waiting for the organ to strike the first triumphant chords in the music that would herald the arrival of his bride.
A girl, he realized with a shaft of horror, whom he hardly knew.
How on earth had it all happened? He wondered if she too had been inveigled into this marriage. Was she also feeling as he did at this moment? Utterly panic-stricken.
‘I can’t go through with it, Francis. I can’t marry Louise. I—’
His brother’s grip was vice-like on his arm. ‘My dear boy, of course you must go through with it. Just cold feet, that’s all.’
But this was more than cold feet, more than just wedding-day nerves. Robert made to pull away, to pull free, but Francis held him fast.
Now the older brother spoke through gritted teeth. ‘It’s all gone too far now. Think of the trouble you’d cause. If nothing else, think of the company.’
‘The – the company? Is – is that all you can think about?’
Slowly Francis turned his head, his cold blue eyes a steely gaze upon his younger brother. ‘The Gorton Trawler Company – and what this marriage will mean to it – is all that matters.’
Robert felt a cold sweat. It wasn’t that he didn’t like Louise. She was a sweet girl, with blonde hair cut short to frame her delicate features that were like those of a fine porcelain doll. Though he did not, he thought as another spasm of fear gripped his insides, love her.
‘Francis, I really can’t . . .’ he began but when he turned his head again, the pain stabbed once more. Robert groaned aloud and then tried to stifle the sound that seemed to echo around the rafters of the church roof. ‘I’ve never been this bad before.’
Francis gave a snort of laughter. ‘Well, I lost count how much ale you had and then,’ he paused significantly, ‘you went on to the rum.’
Now Robert groaned again, making no effort this time to conceal the noise. ‘Oh hell,’ he said under his breath. ‘You know rum makes me bad. Why didn’t you stop me?’ There was a pause, then bitterly, Robert added, ‘It was you giving me it, wasn’t it? Pouring it down my throat.’
‘I thought you ought to have a good time on your last night of freedom.’
‘You call that a good time?’ the bridegroom said with feeling. ‘When I can’t even remember leaving the pub let alone anything after that.’
‘What a shame. Then you have no recollection of the girl?’
‘Girl? What girl?’ Robert turned towards him again, ignoring the stab of pain this time. ‘What – what happened? What did I do?’
At that moment, the organ broke into the bridal march and there was a stirring through the church as the congregation rose to its feet.
‘Forget it,’ Francis said. ‘I think Edwin took care of it anyway. And if there’s any further bother—’
‘Bother? What sort of bother? Tell me,’ Robert demanded as they got up.
‘I said, forget it. It’ll be all right. You’re getting married and your beautiful bride is walking up the aisle behind you at this very moment. Just forget about what happened last night.’
‘But I don’t know what did happen . . .’ he began but Francis was pushing him forward to stand before the steps at the end of the aisle.
As Robert fixed his gaze upon the huge stained-glass window above the altar, he was thinking, not of his bride walking slowly to stand beside him, but of a girl in the darkness of the alley bending over him and shouting at him.
Jeannie soon slipped into the work as a gutter alongside the other fisher lasses standing at the farlanes – the waist-high troughs overflowing with slippery herring. Mary and Flora were friendly, laughing and joking as they worked, but their hands moved like lightning. Flora was the other gutter in their team of three, slicing open the fish with a long, easy motion from head to tail, scooping out the insides and then tossing the fish to Mary, the packer. It was a bright, warm morning and soon the girls were taking off the thick scarves from around their necks. The fish dock rang with their laughter and their Scottish voices. Jeannie felt good to be amongst her own kin. The Lawrences had made her welcome in their home and not just because of the gratitude they felt but also because she was a Scottish lassie too and far from home. Nell would remember, even after all these years, what that felt like.
Jeannie half-listened to the gossip flying around her as she worked, but when Flora said, ‘It’s the Hayes-Gorton wedding today,’ her interest sharpened.
Mary was laughing. ‘Aye, and the bridegroom’ll have a thick head this morning. They were pouring the drink down his throat last night in the Fisherman’s . . .’ And then, lest anyone should think she had been present, she added quickly, ‘So I heard.’
‘Och aye,’ Flora teased, quick on the uptake. ‘I bet you were there, Mary Fraser, with your man.’
Joining in the repartee, Jeannie winked at Flora and called back over her shoulder to their packer. ‘You got a man then, Mary?’
‘No, I havena,’ came the quick reply, a little too quickly to be convincing and Jeannie and Flora laughed aloud.
‘She’d’ve liked to be marrying Robert Hayes-Gorton hersel’ this morning.’
‘Who wouldna?’ Mary’s voice was dreamy but her busy hands never slackened their pace.
Flora actually paused for a moment in her work and stared at Jeannie. ‘You mean you dinna ken who the Hayes-Gorton family are?’
Jeannie shook her head. She had a shrewd idea from the conversation that had passed between the members of the Lawrence family the previous evening, but by feigning ignorance now, she realized she could learn more.
Behind her, Mary giggled. ‘You’d better tell her, Flora.’ She lifted her head and shouted to the other girls working close by. ‘Listen, everyone. Story time.’
‘Go on, then, Flora,’ called a voice nearby. ‘“Once upon a time . . .”’ There was a ripple of laughter, but then those within earshot fell silent, ready to listen.
The centre of attention, Flora preened herself. ‘The Gorton Trawler Company is the second biggest trawler owner in Havelock . . .’
‘And the biggest is the Hathersage Company,’ put in another voice.
‘Ssh, let Flora tell it.’
‘Aye, she’s a born storyteller. Go on, Flo.’
All the while a thousand bound fingers never stilled, sharp knives flashing. Hands plunged into the brine-filled farlanes to pick up the fish. Herring, their scales sparkling in the sunlight, were ever on the move being gutted, tossed and packed. The coopers moved amongst the girls, inspecting the packers’ work, removing the full, heavy barrels and bringing empty ones. Thirty-five barrels a day, Billy McBride demanded from each team and with eight hundred to a thousand fish to each barrel, the fisher lasses stood there hour after hour with not a moment to waste. Banter and laughter, or a story, were welcome diversions.
Like an actress centre-stage, Flora began. ‘The Gorton Company was founded in the 1880s by Thomas Gorton. He was just an ordinary fisherman then, but he married the daughter of the feller who owned the boat he skippered. The girl’s father was against it.’ She laughed. ‘I s’pose he thought Thomas was just after his boat.’
The Fisher Lass Page 3