Seasons of Bliss (Saskatchewan Saga Book #4)
© 2002 by Ruth Glover
Published by Revell
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.revellbooks.com
Ebook edition created 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owners. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-4412-3935-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
To Hal
Best of husbands
Best of friends
Contents
T
he arms of Robbie Dunbar! Was there another place to compare with them in the whole wide world? How many times had Tierney dreamed of them being around her, tight and warm, as they were now? How many times had she cried herself to sleep for lack of them? Never having felt them, still she knew how they would feel—hungry, loving, sheltering. A haven.
Having dared the dangers of wild and tossing seas, Tierney knew about the need for a haven. But hadn’t she declared that she would follow Robbie Dunbar to the ends of the earth? Even to Timbuktu, if necessary? And hadn’t Robbie gone off two years ago, as to the ends of the earth, and left her in Scotland, hopeless of ever seeing him again and helpless to do anything about it?
Saskatchewan was a far cry from Timbuktu, but it was no less inaccessible. Yet here she was, and—wonder of all wonders—here he was!
Standing in the circle of Robbie Dunbar’s arms—feet planted in the freshly turned furrow of a raw homestead, far, far from Scotland and all things familiar—Tierney felt herself to be in a dream. One moment, it seemed, she had been amid familiar mud-dabbed, straw-thatched crofts, the next, in the wilds of northern Saskatchewan.
Of course, it hadn’t been that simple. Or that quick.
But already fading from memory were the miseries of the long ocean voyage. Even the face of Ishbel Mountjoy, that intrepid advocate and employee of the British Women’s Emigration Society responsible for her move from Scotland to Canada, seemed dim and distant, in memory as in fact. All, all was forgotten in the feeling of unreality that gripped Tierney now.
But a horse, a very real horse, stomped a foot nearby, somewhere a bird sang, and the arms—the very real arms of Robbie Dunbar—tightened.
“Robbie . . . Robbie Dunbar . . . is it ye, Robbie? Is it yoursel’?”
Leaning her head back and raising her eyes to the suntanned face so close to her own, so close and so familiar, Tierney asked the question wonderingly.
Robbie’s arms—those arms denied her heretofore—seemed unwilling to let her go. His lips, the lips that had never kissed hers, pressed themselves into the abandon of her hair—her hat having fallen off as she ran—as he pulled her close again.
As clearly as though it were yesterday rather than more than two years ago, Tierney recalled their farewell moments high on the hillside above the small Scottish seaside town of Binkiebrae, he to leave forever for Canada, she to remain behind. Remain forever in Binkiebrae, and with few if any memories to cherish, just a dream of what might have been, of what she had always supposed would be, had taken for granted would be.
With all of life ahead, in which their love could ripen and come to fruition and fulfillment, Tierney and Robbie had never felt any urgency about it. Rather, they had accepted and nourished it with joy and satisfaction, allowing it to grow and deepen naturally, confident they had a lifetime to savor it. They, as their parents and grandparents before them and
their
parents and grandparents before them, and back and back, would settle into a croft of their own, becoming a small, insignificant but solid part of the history that was Binkiebrae’s. Robbie Dunbar and Tierney Caulder were meant for each other.
Then had come the shattering edict of Robbie’s father: Robbie and his brother Allan were to leave for the new homesteads opening in Canada and offered free to all comers. Eventually, if everything went well, the rest of the family would follow; certainly Robbie and Allan would never return.
With her mother dead and her own father dying, with no money and no hope of following, Tierney had seen her dreams crumple and die, that morning on the hillside, like a bud that had been cut down before it blossomed. And indeed, the possibility of her going with him, or even following at some later date, had not been mentioned or considered, so remote was the idea. Robbie Dunbar knew as surely as did Tierney that it was impossible. The parting was forever. He was going off to the ends of the earth; she was remaining in Binkiebrae. She was remaining, with no choice but to become a dried-up, lonely old maid. For with Robbie gone, love and marriage and children were gone; there would never be anyone for Tierney but Robbie Dunbar.
Even then, in their final moments together, with the wind skirmishing sadly about them and the distant sea sparkling like tears, Robbie had not kissed her. But he had touched her. Taking her chin in his hand, his eyes burning with unexpressed emotions, he had turned her face toward him. Tenderly he had placed a hand on each side of her face, her tear-streaked face, and looked deeply into her eyes. As though she were experienced in the tender art of kissing, simply and naturally Tierney
had lifted her face. Her eyes closed, her heart breaking, she had lifted her lips to Robbie Dunbar.
But Robbie had not kissed her. With a low sound that from a less fine man would have been something between a curse and a groan, Robbie had dropped his hands and stepped back from her, clenching his jaws. “I canna, lass,
I canna!
” he had groaned. “I canna kiss ye, else I’d ne’er leave ye!”
And Robbie, resigned to his fate as she was to hers, had stumbled backwards, turned, and was off, leaping and bounding down the steep hillside, away from her. It was her last sight of Robbie Dunbar; it was her lasting nightmare.
After her father’s death, and Robbie long gone, Tierney had met up with Ishbel Mountjoy and her incredible offer: Sign up with the British Women’s Emigration Society, go to Canada, and experience a new life in a new land.
It had taken but a short moment’s consideration for Tierney to fling caution to the winds and join the throng of girls and women agreeing to become “domestics” on the prairies of distant Canada. Amazingly, it was at no cost to them, except that a part of their pay would be returned, for a while, to the government so urgently desiring their services. And though no one could see at the time that it would be so, these same domestics—eventually tens of thousands of them—would change history as they married, had children, and raised up a new generation of Canadians.
Most of them, however, had no intention of setting out to change the world; they were simply following the only opening there was; single women, particularly, had few if any options. Thus it was that Ishbel Mountjoy’s proposal had sounded a note of hope that Tierney and others like her had been unable to resist.
For many of them it meant flight, flight from meaningless lives with no future. For Tierney it meant escaping a pointless existence in the home of her brother and his wife. That the flight took her halfway around the world, to end up in the expanse of prairie or the wilds of the bush, no matter!
Tierney, after a few months on Will and Lavinia Ketchum’s chicken ranch, accepted an opportunity to go northward, and had, earlier in the day, alighted from the train in the heart of the bush, or parkland, immediately falling in love with the flourishing growth, so different from the barren prairies to the south. She was met by Herbert Bloom, father of Lavinia, prepared to take up her duties as a domestic in the home of Herbert and his wife, Lydia.
The buggy ride from Prince Albert to Bliss had been a time of getting acquainted. Tierney told Mr. Bloom about Will and the chicken ranch. She told him the sad details of Lavinia’s death in childbirth. Herbert wanted to hear about his grandson, Buster, and how he was settling down happily with his new mother. Will, like others in the same situation, had found it expedient to marry quickly. Herbert, in turn, described the Bloom homestead, assuring her that he and Lydia were eager to have Tierney join their household, needing her badly. Lydia, he explained, was cruelly incapacitated with rheumatism and no longer able to keep up the many tasks required in the running of a farm.
They stopped at the small hamlet of Bliss to pick up the mail and, at various homes along the way, dropped it off, which was the custom and a friendly, helpful thing to do.
One final stop was the homestead of a young man who had recently taken up residence in the community of Bliss. They found him plowing, turning over the soil of his homestead for the first time. Tierney, cramped from the train and buggy rides, had offered to take the letter across the small field to him. Hopping from the buggy she sprinted, long-limbed and free as a feather, across the furrows, holding the letter aloft and calling for attention.
Herbert Bloom, waiting in the buggy, soon had cause to be astonished. The plowman, eventually hearing Tierney’s call over the sound of the team’s clopping feet and the roots tearing loose as the soil came free and rolled back, turned, froze in place, dropped the reins and ran, fleet as any colt, to meet the girl. The lassie, pausing momentarily, had taken flight into the arms of the man, a young man who was known only sketchily
to Herbert Bloom, but who was, apparently, well-known to the girl Tierney Caulder, incredible as it seemed. Why else would a proper young woman fling herself into a man’s arms? And linger there, rocked there, weeping there? Herbert Bloom, unaccustomed to imaginations and flights-of-fancy, may be excused for gaping blankly.