Buch lesen: «The Girl from Galloway»

Chapter 1

Ardtur, County Donegal

April 1845

Hannah McGinley put down her sewing and moved across the tramped earth floor to where the door of the cottage stood open through all the daylight hours, except in the coldest and stormiest of weather. She stood on the well-swept door stone, looked up at the pale, overcast sky and ran her eye along the stone walls that enclosed their small patch of potato garden. Beyond the wall, the hawthorns partly masked the stony track, which ran down the mountainside.

There was no sign of them yet. No familiar figures walked, ran, or skipped up the narrow rocky path leading steeply up the mountainside from the broader track that ran along the lower contours of the mountain. Below that, the final, bush-filled slopes dropped more gently to the shore of Lough Gartan. The only movement she could detect in the deep quiet of the grey, late April afternoon were flickers of light reflected from the calm surface of the lake itself, just visible between the still-bare trees and the pale rise of smoke from the cottage of her nearest neighbour.

Dotted along the mountainside above the lake, clusters of cottages like Ardtur itself huddled together in the shelter of the mountain, its brooding shape offering some defence against the battering of westerly winds from the Atlantic, westerlies that brought both mildness and heavy rain to this rugged landscape.

She moved back to the hearth, hung the kettle over the glowing embers of the turf fire and took up her sewing again. She paused to push back a few strands of long, fair hair that had escaped from the ribbon with which she tied it firmly each morning. Touching the gleaming strands, she smiled to herself, thinking of her daughter. Rose was as dark as she herself was fair, her eyes and colouring so like Patrick, her husband, while Sam, a year younger, pale-skinned and red-haired, so closely resembled her father, Duncan Mackay, far away in Scotland where she had been born and grew up.

They were good children, always willing to help with whatever task she might have in hand; Rose, the older, patient and thoughtful; Sam quick, often impatient, but always willing to do as she asked. Even now, though he was lightly built and only eight years old, he would run to help if he saw her move to lift a creel of potatoes or turf, or to pick up the empty pails to fetch water from the well.

She thought for a moment of her everyday tasks and reflected that she had not become entirely familiar with the harsh, yet beautiful place where she’d lived for the ten years of her married life. It surprised her that she still woke up every morning thinking of the well-built, two-storey farmhouse in Galloway and the view from the south-facing window of the bedroom she had shared with one of her older sisters. Then, she had seen a very different landscape: green fields and trees sloping gently towards the seashore, rich pasture dotted with sheep, well cared for and prosperous, the delight of her hard-working father who loved his land as well as or perhaps even better than he loved his God.

Duncan Mackay was seen by many as a hard man, one who did not suffer fools gladly, shrewd in his dealings, strong in his Covenanter beliefs and not given to generosity, but, to his youngest daughter, Hannah, he showed a gentleness few others ever saw. It was Hannah’s sorrow that in making her own life she’d had to leave him, widowed and now alone, her brothers and sisters married and moved into their own lives, two of them far away in Nova Scotia. Only her youngest brother, Matthew, running a boat-building yard on the Galloway coast close to Port William, was near enough to make the journey to their old home near Dundrennan, once or twice a year.

She knew her father still grieved for the choice she had made, though he had long ago accepted the quality of the man she’d married. But it had been hard for him. Patrick McGinley was a landless labourer, one of the many who took the boat from Derry, or Belfast, or the small ports nearest to the Glens of Antrim and went over to Scotland and the North of England to provide extra labour on the farms through the long season from the cutting of grass for silage, to the final picking and storing of the potato crop.

From early May till late October, or even November, if there was other farm work that needed doing, the ‘haymakers’ came. They lived in a barn cleared out for them each springtime, and worked on the land, labouring from dawn to dusk in the long summer days, and they sent home money each week to support their families on rough hillsides with tiny holdings like this one. The only source of food was potatoes from the small patch of land behind or beside each cottage and what could be bought with the earnings of the few women who had the skill to do embroidery such as whitework, or sprigging.

For three years Patrick had come with a group of men and boys from Donegal, all good workers, as her father freely acknowledged. While they frequently worked on neighbouring farms, their base was Mackay’s, the farm south-east of Dundrennan, the one her father had bought after long years of working with his brother in the drapery trade in Dumfries.

Her father had always wanted his own farm. His elder brother, Ross, had once told Hannah that even as a small boy in their home in the far north-west of Scotland, he had talked about it. He’d explained to Ross when he was still a boy that he wanted good soil and fine pasture so he could keep cattle or sheep, that would be plump and well fed, not bony like the few animals they had on the poor piece of land they rented from an English landlord they had never seen.

Years later, Ross and Duncan arrived barefoot and penniless in Dumfries, two victims of the Sutherland clearances; they’d been turned out of their croft and land in Strathnaver, with only the clothes they wore and what few possessions they could carry. As they tramped south looking for a means of survival, it seemed that Duncan’s dream had remained intact.

Hannah would never forget the way her father told parts of their story over and over again, throughout her childhood. Every time they sat down to eat, he would give thanks for their food, even if it were only a bowl of porridge. He reminded them time and time again that he and their uncle Ross had travelled the length of Scotland on ‘burn water and the kindness of the poor’, with no place to lay their heads but the heather on the hill.

*

By the time the Mackay brothers arrived in Dumfries they were famished, their boots long disintegrated, their clothes tattered, stained and faded from sleeping in the heather, being drenched by rain and exposed to the sun. When they’d seen the notice in a draper’s window asking for two strong lads, they’d tidied themselves up as best they could and tried to look robust, despite their thinness.

The shop, in the main street of Dumfries, sold fabric but its main purpose was as a collecting centre for woven materials brought in from outworkers who spun, or wove, in their own homes – small cottages with a tiny piece of land, a potato garden, or a cow, as their only other support. The older man, the draper who ran the business, needed strong lads to hump the bales of fabric coming in from the home workers, the bundles of handkerchiefs and napkins going out to merchants in England and the heavy webs of woollen cloth going much further afield. The brothers were weak with hunger, but both now in their twenties and knowing well how much depended on it, they managed to heft the heavy bales as if they were merely parcels.

They got the job. The hours were long, but there was a loft to sleep in and a daily meal as part of their small income. Neither of them knew anything about fabric, about the mysteries of spinning or weaving, but they learnt quickly, grew stronger in body and more confident in mind. According to Ross, even in those first years when they earned very little, Duncan had already begun to save for ‘his farm’ from his meagre salary.

Hannah’s father took pride in telling her how they had helped the older man to expand the business and make it so very profitable that he regularly increased their wages. Some five years later, he offered them each a share in the business as well.

With no son of his own and well pleased with their commitment to their work, Mr McAllister, the draper, regularly said that when he retired he hoped they would be able to buy the business from him. In the meantime, he did all he could to make that possible for them.

He was as good as his word. A few years later, when Sandy McAllister finally decided to retire, the two brothers bought the business and Duncan then sold his share to his brother. With the money released and his savings Duncan then bought a small, neglected farm just a few miles outside Dumfries itself.

Hannah had never known that first farm. But her father had told her the tale of how it had been owned by an old woman, long widowed, her sons all in America. Although the sons had sent her money, it was only enough to buy food; she had none left over to pay for labour.

She had watched the few small fields fill with rushes and weeds, her only comfort the memory of happier times with her husband and children. They’d never had much money but the boys had been fed and clothed and walked barefoot to the local school. There, they became star pupils. By the time Duncan Mackay bought the farm from the old woman’s executors, and learnt the story of its previous owner, her sons were wealthy businessmen in Detroit who barely noticed the small sum of money from the sale of their old home, their inheritance from a life long-forgotten.

*

The fire was burning up more brightly since Hannah had added a few pieces of fresh turf, but there was still no sound of children’s voices. It was too soon to make the mugs of tea that welcomed them home at the end of their day. She spread the patterned damask on her knee, smoothed it out and began hemming the last side of the napkin as her mind wandered back to her father’s stories of his younger days.

Duncan Mackay’s second farm was much further away from Dumfries. It was there that Hannah herself was born, the seventh and last child of Duncan and the former Flora McAllister, the daughter of the draper who had taken Duncan and Ross barefoot from the main street in Dumfries, fed them and given them boots and clothes for their new job.

Duncan loved Flora dearly but he had so wanted a son he could hardly contain his impatience in the tiny farmhouse where his three daughters were born one after the other. He was overjoyed when his first son was born, to be followed by two more. Hannah, as everyone used to tell her when she was a child, was ‘the surprise’ – an unexpected, late child born many years after her nearest brother. It was always Hannah’s sadness that she never knew her mother. She had died within a year of her birth, perhaps – as so many women were in those days – worn out by the daily drudgery of work on a farm and the continuous demands of miscarriages, pregnancies and births.

She pushed away the sad thought and remembered instead her three older sisters: Jean, Fiona and Flora, who had all taken care of her and played with her, the wide gap in age making her almost like their own first child. She had been loved and cherished by all three of them. What surprised all of them, as baby Hannah got to her feet and walked, was the way in which she attached herself to her father from the moment she was steady enough to follow him around.

Later, they had each told her how she followed him wherever he went, unless he explained kindly, which he always did, that it was not safe for her to be with him just then and she must go back to her sisters.

But it was not Hannah’s devotion to her father that surprised her good-natured sisters the most; it was their father’s toleration of such a young child. From the point at which Hannah could walk they began to see a very different man from the fair, hard-working, but very impersonal father they themselves had known in their growing years.

Now in his sixties, her father had no one to share the solid, two-storey house with. It was once such a busy place, full of life and activity, its small garden rich in flowers, her mother’s great joy, which her sisters had gone on caring for in her memory throughout Hannah’s childhood. They often brought bouquets and posies into the house to add colour to the solid furniture and plain whitewashed walls.

Her sisters were now long married and scattered, her brothers Gavin and James were in Nova Scotia, and she, her father’s youngest and most beloved daughter, in Donegal, his only contact the letters Hannah wrote so regularly. At least Duncan could rely on the yearly arrival of his son-in-law, Patrick, still coming to labour alongside him with some neighbouring men from Casheltown and Staghall who had been haymakers all their working lives.

Hannah still remembered the first time she’d seen Patrick, walking down the lane to the farm, one of a small group hired for the season to take the place of her absent brothers. Lightly built, dark-haired with deep, dark eyes, tanned by wind and rain, he moved with ease despite the weariness of the long walk from the boat that had brought them from Derry to Cairnryan.

Her father had greeted them formally, one by one, showing them into the well-swept barn where they would live for the season.

‘This is my daughter, Hannah,’ he had said, more than a hint of pride clear in his voice. Patrick had looked at her and smiled. Even then it had seemed to her as if his eyes were full of love.

She was just seventeen and working as a monitor at the local school, the one she herself had attended. It never occurred to her, when she offered to help the small group of harvesters with learning what they called ‘Scotch’, that she would also become fluent in another language and through it, come to love a man who listened devotedly to all she said but thought it wrong to speak of his love to a young girl who seemed so far out of reach.

Hannah dropped her work hastily now and reached for the teapot warming by the hearth as a sudden outburst of noise roused her and grew stronger. She made the tea, set it to draw, and stood watching from the doorway as the small group of children of Ardtur ran up the last long slope, their shouts and arguments forgotten, as they focused on open doors and the prospect of a mug of tea while they relayed the day’s news.

‘Oh, Ma, I’m hungry,’ said Sam, rolling his eyes and rubbing his stomach, the moment she had kissed him.

‘You’re always hungry,’ protested his sister, as she turned from hanging up her schoolbag on the lowest of a row of hooks by the door. ‘You had your piece at lunchtime,’ she said practically, looking at him severely. ‘I’m not hungry. At least not very,’ she added honestly, when Hannah in turn looked at her.

‘Well,’ said Hannah, unable to resist Sam’s expressive twists and turns. ‘You could have a piece of the new soda bread. There’s still some jam, but there’s no butter till I go up to Aunt Mary tomorrow,’ she added, as he dropped his schoolbag on the floor.

Sam nodded vigorously. Then, when Rose looked at him meaningfully, he picked it up again, went and hung it on the hook beside Rose’s and sat down at the kitchen table looking hopeful.

‘So what did you learn today?’ Hannah asked, as she poured mugs of tea and brought milk from the cold windowsill at the back of the house. She knew from long experience that Rose would tell her in detail all that had happened at school while Sam would devote himself entirely to the piece of soda bread she was now carving from the circular cake she had made in the morning’s baking.

‘Can I get the jam for you, Ma?’ he asked, as he eyed the sweet-smelling soda bread she put in front of him.

‘Can you reach?’ she asked gently.

‘Oh yes, Ma. Da says I’m growing like a bad weed,’ he replied cheerfully. ‘Look,’ he went on, jumping up from the table and standing on tiptoe to open the upper doors of the cupboard. He stretched up, clutched a jam jar firmly in his hand and studied the contents. Hannah saw his look of disappointment and was about to speak, but then he smiled.

He’d seen the jar contained only a small helping of the rich-tasting jam she’d made from the bowls of berries they’d helped her to pick the previous year but now, as he looked at it hungrily, Sam was already reckoning there would be more next season. By September, he would be bigger; he could reach places he’d had to miss last year. He would also be able to get at places where the big boys had got to before him.

He sat down in his place, unscrewed the lid and scraped out every last vestige of the sweet, rich, dark jam and then spread it carefully over his piece of soda bread.

He heard nothing of what Rose had learnt at school that day and didn’t even notice the small envelope she fetched from her schoolbag and handed to his mother.