Red Rowan Berry Read online

  Janet looked at her incredulously.

  "And what was that, pray?"

  “To get you properly married. When I was your age I was married and had two bairns already ... "

  "Aye," said Janet drily, "we all ken you wasted no time."

  This hint that Kirsty's wedding to· Jock had been a trifle hurried she regretted as soon as it was out. Kirsty went a deep plum colour and began to shout.

  "You re at that, are you! Well, let me tell you this ... we sinned, maybe, Jock and me, but it was no more of a sin than your mother living away from your father these seventeen year. If she'd been a right wife to him she'd have gone to the town. I'd be shamed to let my Jock live himself that way."

  Janet had borne a great deal and she could never stand to hear her mother criticised. She put down the tray of china on the dresser and turned to Kirsty.

  "My mother" she said evenly, “was worth six of you or any other tattling jaud in this parish or any other. She was the best housewife and the best farmer in the district. What would a woman like her have done in the town?"

  'She'd have done her duty! She was a bad wife to John Laidlaw and I don't care who hears me say so."

  "Don't you speak so of my mother!"

  "I'll speak as I find ... never in six year was she civil to me ... never! She was an ill-tongued bitch and aye thought herself too good for her company."

  "I don't blame her ... " said Janet, "she'd no patience with fools ... and she'd no law for women who'd drag a man to the Kirk the way you did."

  Jock, alarmed and distressed at the turn of events, tried to come between the two women but was pushed aside by his wife with a shove from her elbow which sent him reeling back against the cabinet destined to grace the manse.

  "And let me tell you a, thing or two, mistress," Janet went on, "as long as you're so free with my mother's name. It's a better thing, to my mind, to live apart from your man than make him a speak and a joke over the whole parish for the way you mistreat him. A real grey mare he took to his stable, my poor Jock, and a sore penance he's had to pay for a 'few minutes' pleasure at the harvest ... if pleasure it was ... "

  Kirsty gobbled incoherently at her.

  "You've made a dog's breakfast of his farm for him with your interference and while I won't come and have an eye to my wee nephews it's time and high time somebody did, for they're dressed like tinks and let run wild!"

  For a few seconds Janet thought her sister-in-law would have a fit. Her face was purple with anger and her throat swollen above the tight, high-boned collar of her dress. However, the moment passed.

  "Come, Jock," she got out at last, "damn the help you'll give this throughither bitch. I'll see to it, mistress, for he'll not come his footlength near Glenfoot if you get down on your knees and beg. I'll see him burn in Hell rather."

  She marched out into the lobby, where Betsy just managed to dodge back into the kitchen from her station at the keyhole, and climbed into the waiting trap where she sat and bawled for Jock like a calf bellowing for its mother. Jock, dithering on the door- step, shook his head mournfully at his sister.

  "You shouldn't have spoken that way," he observed mournfully, "she's awful easy riled."

  Janet looked at her brother's woebegone face and knew a pang of remorse. If she knew anything about her sister-in-law it would be Jock who would suffer most for what she had just said.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "truly sorry. But I'm as short in the temper as cat's hair just now and there was no bearing what she said about mother."

  "Aye," he said and shook his head, "but for all she should never have said what she did, she was right enough. A wife's place is at her man's side. 'Every good woman buildeth her house: but the foolish putteth it down with her own hands.' "

  "And if you misquote Proverbs at me," returned Janet sharply, "you mind that there are other texts in the same book: 'It is better to dwell in the corner of the housetop than with a brawling woman and in a wide house.' You take my advice, Jock, and make Kirsty bridle her tongue. The laird cannot abide a troublemaker. Leave your prayer-meetings and tract-carrying for a while and pay some heed to your family. Good night to you."

  Jock turned on his heel and stalked out muttering some in- coherent remark about the godless and joined Kirsty, who was still bawling for him. Janet shut the front door, not with a slam for it was far too stiff for that, but with sufficient force to close it without the need to apply her shoulder. She turned to find Betsy at her back shaking her grey head.

  "Lassie, but you made a right piece of work there. They'll not be back in a hurry."

  "Good riddance," said Janet between her teeth.

  "You'll be sorry for it. Blood's thicker than water."

  "To speak of mother that way and on the very day she was buried ..."

  Janet overwrought with anger and grief began to cry at last. Betsy hustled her into the warm kitchen and put her into Dick's elbowchair with the patchwork cushions.

  "There, lambie, there ... greet away. You've sore need to. There ... there!"

  In an hour's time Janet was tucked up in her bed with a 'het-piggie' wrapped in flannel at her feet and a glass of hot milk well-laced with whisky inside her. She was still catching her breath occasionally from her long fit of crying: the storm subsided slowly and Janet, worn out with nursing and a turbulent mixture of grief, anger and the guilt that survivors feel that they are yet alive and glad of it, was about to blowout her candle and sleep when she remembered the letter from her mother which her father had given to her lying still unread in the pocket of her black silk apron. The letter was easily found but Janet stood by the window for a minute holding the curtain back and staring out at the scene. A pale half moon was scurrying through scattered clouds and the loch waters glinted silver between the dark hills. It was a peaceful scene, as comforting in its serenity as all Betsy's ministrations.

  The letter was rambling and long and the writing wavered from time to time, eloquent of the weakness of the woman who had penned it.

  Jennie-lass, [she had written] when you read this I shall be dead. Don't grieve too 'much for I'm a burden to you and a 'weariness to myself and better it's all by with. But I've a few words to say to you before I go. Don't be coarse on your father, lass. He'd his way to make and it was no fault of his that it was never mine. We should not have married. Ours was a made match. John's father did not wish to divide his farm and John was the younger son. My father needed a man for Glenfoot. I was the only bairn he had and he had no notion of a lassie farming the place so the Parlanes and the LaidIaws made it up between them. It was a good downsitting for John for my father promised he should have Glenfoot after him, and his father would not let him give the arrangement the go-by. I was happy enough for all I wanted to do was to stay on Glenfoot and John was a fine lad and all .the other lasses jealous; but John had a lass already and never let on to me. When the kind folk hereabout told me all about it I was wild angry and hurt and somehow things never did go right for us though we warstled along well enough when you and Jock were bairns. If his lass had lived and married another body it might have been fine but she died young and single still and I aye fancied she was in his eye when he looked my way and it was hard to be civil whiles. And he never had a real notion of the place the way I did and when you were up and my father dead he left the work of the farm more and more to me while he plaistered in his workshop, for he was more interested in the machines and the like of that.

  I never got at the rights of it but he invented some contraption for a steam engine and selled it to folk making .engines for the steamboats. After that he was aye in Glasgow and working for these folk and he came home less and less and I got so that I told myself I didn't care. He wrote a while back would I come to the town where he'd bought a grand house and I thought I would go but the hay was cutting and. when it was all in I'd had time to think again and I knew fine I'd never thole living in a town. He wrote again but after a while he stopped writing.

  So, you'll understand the
re's faults on both sides, Jennie-lass. Your father's a good man for all he's so dour. He's borne with me and my bitter tongue and never cast it up to me that I wasn't the one he'd wanted .to wed. Whiles I've wished he would, for all it's a bitter thing to be taken for your land and gear and no for yourself.

  There's another thing that's in my mind. He's a partner with these ship-building folk now. They're real taken up with him and his contraptions from what he says. He borrowed on Glenfoot to buy in with them till my heart was in my mouth over the risk but that's all by with now and the money paid back: but I doubt he'll be rid of the place when I'm dead. He's a clever man and not one to hang on the breeching and be content with what he has. If the money will help him I don't begrudge it: it's all I ever had to give him, it seems to me now, for you were my bairn from the start, bonnie wee thing that you were, and Jock was a poor soul, a sapsie bairn, aye scared of his father and no very clever at the school.

  Jennie-lass, whiles I fret for you. You're that bonnie and I cannot see how you will go on without me to see after you. There's never a lad hereabout fit to tie your shoe, and you'll not meet anyone while you're tied to Glenfoot. You cannot bide with Jock for yon wife of his will drive you gyte in a week. I've seen to it Dick and Betsy will have a roof to offer you if you need it but what would you do there at the back of beyond? Don't hang back from going to your father in the town because of anything you might fancy between him and me. And don't marry the first lad that offers for the sake of a hearth and home of your own, An ill marriage is a weariness all your days.

  Goodbye, my own dear lass,

  Your Mother.

  Janet folded up the sheets of paper and put them under her pillow. After a minute or two she blew out the candle and lay awake looking out at the moonlit waters of the loch and considering her situation. In the distress and confusion of her mother's sickness and death it had not occurred to Janet to wonder what would become of herself. It was characteristic of her mother that she should have foreseen what would happen. The letter spoke so clearly with Elspeth's voice and stressed so much what Janet had lost with her death that she wept again for the grim humour and commonsense and the astringency of her tongue and grieved for the unhappiness revealed in the letter. However, she was too weary to cry long and fell asleep on a wet pillow with her hand below it holding the letter as if it were her mother's hand, as in a sense it was.

  CHAPTER 2

  KIRSTY WAS AS good as her word: as the hard, cold spring gave way to a wet summer neither she nor Jock came near Glenfoot. Jock waylaid his sister occasionally, when Kirsty was occupied elsewhere, and enquired tentatively if all was well, but even had it not been there was little he could have done. Janet struggled with the lambing and the potato planting and the flood which came in April-month without more help than Dick and the men could give. She took the stirks to market herself because Dick had to mend fences on the boundary where her cows had trampled Kirsty's father's hay, and a poor price she would have got for them after the business of getting them on and off the steamer except that the auctioneer remembered Elspeth.

  "Aye, gentlemen!" he had bawled, "Don't ask me to take yon price for these beasts off Glenfoot. I'm over near my latter end and Elspeth Laidlaw will be waiting for me wherever she's gone, the soul, if I don't get her lass a decent-price!"

  The buyers had laughed at this apprehension and bid and Janet had gone back to the laid hay and the grey weeping sky above it with a lighter heart. However, she was not wholly without help; of a kind. Donald Patterson came about the doors, twice and three time in a week. Kirsty, whose eye to the main chance was unaffected by anything so commonplace as a quarrel, did not fail to remember that her young brother still lacked a bride; Donald in his turn was willing enough to court a girl who had insulted his sister (the story had grown in the telling) on the offchance that John Laidlaw might see sense and there would be a good farm to go with her. As Kirsty said, it would be all in the family. Donald's mother said with a sniff that yon Janet could count herself lucky and his father, while less sanguine about Donald's merits, was not displeased at the prospect, for Glenfoot marched with his farm on its upper boundary.

  Donald's wooing was not exactly subtle: a conviction of his own excellence and worth was strongly rooted in him and fostered by his mother and sister, both blinded by affection to his defects. Such defects included a notion that to wash was unmanly and he did so with reluctance only on Saturday nights before donning the Sabbath's clean semmit and shirt ... not to mention socks. From Tuesday on, unless the weather was very cold, it was advisable to hold converse with Donald out of doors and keep to windward of him at that. Indoors, conversation with him was made even more trying by his inability to talk below a bellow, a trait induced by a natural indolence which led him to prefer shouting across a gap to walking across it ... an indolence which made his offers of aid limited in actual application. He preferred shouting advice from the field gate or barn door to taking off his jacket and getting down to work. He left Janet in no doubt of his intentions because he could be in no doubt of her welcoming them. He was at no pains to propose she should marry him but merely took it for granted that she would: a tactic difficult to counter.

  Janet found these continual visits at first an inconvenience, then a joke and then after three months when he evidently considered that his wooing need no longer confine itself to shouts, a persecution. Elspeth would have wasted no time in sending him to the rightabout, as she had done with a number of previous suitors, but for Janet it was a persecution hard to avoid situated as she was. Jock was in too much fear of Kirsty to help her, for when Janet on one of their rare meetings applied to him to rid her of this affliction he pressed her to accept Donald, giving as his reason for this wish that Donald would be a useful neighbour and was his good friend. He expatiated on the advantages of the match at some length and with great earnestness. Janet heard him out and realised she would find no help in that quarter.

  "Friends! Neighbours!" she returned bitterly, "you live three miles away ... and upwind!"

  Jock pretended not to know what she meant.

  Nor would the men on Glenfoot help her. They all knew that yon DonaId would have to be thrown off the place, neck and crop, for he was not a man to heed hints even if he had understood them and as none of them were certain what Laidlaw intended for Glenfoot they did not wish to offend old Patterson who might some day offer them a job. Good places were hard to come by.

  In the first week of June the clouds lifted, the sun came out and the hay dried. Janet and Dick laboured all the hours of day- light to cut, dry and stack it, like every other farm in the district. With the hay all in and better than anybody would have believed possible in May, Janet drew breath for a while and considered a visit to Glasgow to discover what plans her father might have. The time was near when she and Dick would have to consider the work for the coming year. Her father's letters had been unusually few and far from informative. She had got no further than considering this when she had a brief note from him to say that he had despatched a box of books for her by the steamer and that it should arrive on the following day. She harnessed the mare into the trap and went to Luss pier to meet the midday boat. The steamer fussed into the pier with her paddles churning and a cloud of gulls round her like the cloud of flies round a cow in -the pasture. The Prince Consort edged in carefully and a group of passengers gathered on the paddlebox where two crewmen were ready to put out the gangway and hand over the pile of parcels and bundles to the piermaster with whom they exchanged cheerful insults in a mixture of Gaelic and English as the gap closed between them. Janet looked idly at the passengers to see whether there was anyone she knew, but they were strangers for the most part, barring the herd from Glen Douglas and his wife who had been to their son's wedding in BaImaha. Among them was a tall, fair-haired young man with a close-cut beard wearing an Inverness cape and carrying a selection of rod-cases. Janet guessed that he would be the lodger expected by the widow Maxwell at Camstradden. Mary Ann had
been up for eggs and some prints of Betsy's butter the previous evening. She eked out a tiny pension for her man killed long since at Balaclava in the Crimea, by taking in visitors who came for the fishing and for whom she had kept her husband's boat, by now elderly and leaky. She had worked as a cook at Camstradden House and her visitors considered her cooking worth the risks they ran in her boat, for they came again and again and sent their friends. Janet had not seen the tall young man before but no doubt he would have been recommended in this way. The fishers were a close fraternity.

  Alec, the Consort's purser, waved at her and indicated the box at his feet. Evidently the books had arrived. She waved back and waited for the passengers to come off before she went to collect it. There was the usual scatter of small boys trying to earn a halfpenny for carrying baggage and she saw the tall angler confide his valise and rods to one of these while he lifted the heavy box and strode down the pier with it. Janet climbed down hastily and opened the tailgate of the trap so that he could put it in, which he did with a smile of relief.

  "Whew!" he exclaimed and smiled at her, "is it bricks you're having sent you?"

  Alec watching the little group from his post on the paddlebox as he sorted out the rest of the parcels, gave a little chuckle and thought pleasurably of the dram he would have tonight in the inn at Balloch from the half sovereign he had been given. The fisher had been much struck with the sight of Janet, Alec, who had known her since she was a wee lass in a pinafore, allowed that she had become a real bonnie woman and accepted the coin offered for the privilege of taking the box to her. He and the fisher had found a common passion in the taking of trout, though Alec's fishing, as he freely admitted, was mostly nocturnal. He considered he had done Janet no disservice; had he been asked he would have described his acquaintance as a 'decent lad for a Perth man'.