Salty Atlantic waters swelled into the mouth of the River Nith, covering Kirkcudbright’s muddy tidal flats. A hundred and fifty years earlier, Covenanter girls no older than Jenny had been tied to stakes and drowned by the inexorable Solway tides as punishment for their religious beliefs. To this day the gulls grieved those martyred souls, wheeling and diving in the clear June sky. Their shrill keening struck a mournful counterpoint to the bass dirge of the sea.
Not I, thought Jenny, as she watched a boom of timber being floated ashore from one of the ships moored out in the channel. I’ll not be martyred—tied to some bleak upland croft and slowly drowned by a life of drudgery. From the time she could hold a broom, Jenny had taken on the work of a grown woman. Toiling side by side with her mother, she’d cooked, cleaned, spun, churned, washed and mended. Not to mention minding the ever-increasing tribe of boys her parents had bred in their high box bed. Since her mother’s death, full responsibility for the Lennox household had fallen on Jenny’s slight shoulders. Today might be her only chance to escape.
The lighter barges were already beginning to ferry cargo out to the barque St. Bride. Word had come ashore that her master meant to weigh anchor when the tide shifted, roughly two hours hence. In two hours Jenny would be on her way to the New Brunswick colony and a new, better life. If only the Walkers would hurry up and get here!
She peered up the street again. Where could they be? A huge knot clenched in Jenny’s stomach, as indigestible as her stepmother’s oatmeal porritch. It had been many hours since she’d worried down a bowlful and taken tearful leave of her brothers. The older ones had masked their moist eyes with manly gruffness. Warning her not to fall into the ocean during the crossing, they’d begged her to write often—forgetting she didn’t know how.
Wee Malcolm had clung to her skirts wailing fit to wake the dead, until manhandled into the cottage by their stepmother. If only she could have taken him with her, the babby she’d cared for like a mother ever since her own mother’s death. Sinking down onto her new brass-bound cedar trunk, Jenny bit her lips together hard between her teeth. If the Walkers didn’t soon come, she feared she might start bawling herself, pleading with her father to take her home again.
Unwelcome tears were just forming in Jenny’s eyes when she spotted a familiar figure among the Kirkcudbright townsfolk. It was not Mag Walker, a big sowdy woman who outweighed her husband by nearly two stone. Rather a slender girl, wearing a gay bonnet and fashionable traveling outfit.
“Kirstie!” Jenny hailed her friend as she dodged through the crowd on the quayside. “Ye’re a sight for sore eyes,” she exclaimed. “Don’t tell me ye’ve come all the way from Dalbeattie just to see me off?”
Kirsten Robertson was as close a friend as Jenny had made during her hardworking, restricted youth. Though her prosperous father owned Dalbeattie’s granite quarry, Kirstie was not one to put on fine airs. One day, many years back, the Robertsons’ housekeeper had brought the child along on her routine visit to buy eggs from Jenny’s mother. After the two little girls struck up an acquaintance, Kirstie insisted on coming every time. When she got older, she took over the chore herself. Jenny had always looked forward to Kirstie’s visits. They were practically her only chance to hear about school and town and the wide world beyond the Lennox farm.
“Jenny! Is it today ye’re off?” Kirstie looked pleasantly astonished to meet her friend this far from home and so dressed up. “I’ve been the fortnight with my auntie in Dumfries. I didn’t reckon ye were away for a while yet. What a bit of luck I got here to see ye off.”
“What are ye doing in Kirkcudbright, then?” Jenny asked.
Blue as the day’s clear sky, Kirstie Robertson’s eyes twinkled with mirth. “Papa drove Harris Chisholm over to catch his boat, and he made me come along. It fretted Papa something fierce when Mr. Chisholm took it into his head to emigrate. He doesn’t suppose he’ll ever find as good a manager again.”
Hearing the name Harris Chisholm made Jenny’s mouth pucker as though she’d just bitten into a crab apple. She’d often encountered Dalbeattie’s most notorious misogynist at kirk. On those occasions, he’d acknowledged her with a frosty bow and thinly veiled contempt.
“Maybe yer pa was hoping ye’d make a match with Mr. Chisholm so he wouldn’t go away,” Jenny teased her friend. A rich man’s daughter, and a very pretty one, Kirstie had her pick of suitors. However, she showed no interest in settling down anytime soon.
“Harris Chisholm!” Kirstie gave an exasperated chuckle. “Oh, he’d not be so bad if he didn’t always fix me with that lairdly stare of his. It’s plain he thinks I’m a fickle wee dolt.”
Jenny joined in her friend’s laughter. She felt strangely lightened by the knowledge that Harris Chisholm was equally uncivil to lassies far richer and better educated than she.
“Did ye happen to pass Lowell and Mag Walker on the road?” Jenny asked. “I’m to travel with them and I’m getting a mite worried they’ll not make it in time.”
Kirstie Robertson’s blithe little face took on an unwontedly sober cast. “The Lowell Walkers. Haven’t ye heard? Lowell was harnessing that foul-tempered bay of his this morning when the wretched beast up and kicked him in the leg. Broke it in three places below the knee, I heard. Poor Mag is fretted he might lose it. They’ll not be sailing today, if ever.”
“Oh.” Jenny could feel the blood draining from her face. There was no hope of persuading her father to let her make the Atlantic crossing on her own. Her brother, Ross, was second mate on the brig Bunessan. He frequently wrote home lurid tales of the shiftless degenerates who made up his crew. Before Alexander Lennox would suffer his daughter to board the St. Bride, unchaperoned, he would sell himself into indentured servitude to repay her passage money.
She should have known this was too good to be true, Jenny chided herself. It had all worked out far too easily and smoothly—until now. When Roderick Douglas had written home for a bride, the other eligible lassies in Dalbeattie had been reluctant to accept. Some felt nervous of crossing the cold, wide ocean. Others could not abide the notion of parting with their families. Jenny had jumped at the chance to wed a man she’d once adored from afar. A man who was now a prosperous shipbuilder, able to give her the refined, affluent life she craved. Why had she let herself hope for something so miraculous, only to see her dream wreck on the shoals of reality?
Setting her mouth in a resolute line, Jenny squared her shoulders. It would take more than Lowell Walker’s bad-tempered horse and her father’s strict Presbyterian propriety to keep her from her bright destiny. She would find her way to Roderick Douglas even if it meant swimming the North Atlantic!
Kirstie slipped a comforting arm around Jenny’s shoulder. “There must be someone else who’d offer to keep an eye on ye. Folks are awful good about that kind of thing. Let’s go find the agent who booked yer passage and ask him to point out the other passengers to us. There might be a family going who’d be glad of some help with their wee ones.”
Letting Kirstie lead her toward the agent, Jenny barely heard her friend’s optimistic chatter. The man shook his head regretfully when Kirstie asked about other female passengers. Mag Walker and Jenny Lennox were the only women booked aboard the St. Bride.
The agent read off the names of the other half-dozen passengers. “Gregor McKinnon, Donald Beattie, Lowell Walker, George Irving, Gavin Tweedie and Harris Chisholm.”
Fairly dancing at Jenny’s elbow, Kirstie thanked the man for his time.
“That’s a mercy,” she whispered. “For a minute I feared we were out of luck. I’ll ask Mr. Chisholm to keep an eye on ye during the crossing. Then we can just present it to yer pa like it’s all settled. Mr. Chisholm may be a man and he does have a queer way about him. Still, when all’s said and done he’s Dalbeattie born and goes to kirk every Sunday. I ken he’s the best ye can do at short notice.”
As though summoned by the deprecating remarks of his employer’s daughter, Harris Chisholm suddenly appeared, head and shoulders