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