Authors: Jessica Stirling
The Good Provider
Also by Jessica Stirling
The Spoiled Earth
The Hiring Fair
The Dark Pasture
The Deep Well at Noon
The Blue Evening Gone
The Gates of Midnight
Treasures on Earth
Creature Comforts
Hearts of Gold
The Asking Price
The Wise Child
The Welcome Light
A Lantern for the Dark
Shadows on the Shore
The Penny Wedding
The Marrying Kind
The Workhouse Girl
The Island Wife
The Wind from the Hills
The Strawberry Season
Prized Possessions
Sisters Three
Wives at War
The Piper’s Tune
Shamrock Green
The Captive Heart
One True Love
Blessings in Disguise
The Fields of Fortune
A Kiss and a Promise
The Paradise Waltz
A Corner of the Heart
The Last Voyage
About the author
Born in Glasgow, Jessica Stirling is the author of many heartwarming novels, most of which have Scottish backgrounds. She has enjoyed a highly successful career since THE SPOILED EARTH was published in 1974.
The Good Provider
Jessica Stirling
First published in Great Britain in 1988 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Jessica Stirling 1988
The right of Jessica Stirling to be identified as the Author of the
Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
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 without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be
otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that
in which it is published and without a similar condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance
to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
Ebook ISBN 978 1 444 74477 4
Paperback ISBN 978 0 340 76633 0
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
To Sallyanne O’Mara, with thanks
Contents
ONE
The Promise
Nine sorts of weather, one for each parish, had whipped over Ayrshire in the course of that mad March day. Now, towards evening, the wind had backed northerly and great skirts of cloud hid the Carrick grazings and the autocratic hills of Galloway. Hail came hopping over the brow of the Straitons and swiftly engulfed the track that straggled up to Hawkhead farm at the head of the vale. Sheep turned tails to the stinging grains and moved to find shelter among broken dykes or in muddy scrapes under the lip of the hill. But the cattle, all lean and thrawn, roared defiance and stood their ground, refusing to be chased from the burn bank where new growth, mainly weed, gave them bite to supplement the mouldy hay that Clegg had flung out for them that morning.
For Kirsty Barnes there was no shelter. She trudged by the side of a huge Clydesdale horse with nothing but an old potato sack cowled over her head to give her protection. Winter, it seemed, was reluctant to yield to spring and Kirsty was ill-clad for such a changeable season. She had left Hawkhead bare-headed and had been soaked by a rain squall on the trail downhill to Bankhead Mains. Mr Sanderson had found her a towel to dry her hair and the potato sack to serve as a shawl on the long road home. Mrs Sanderson had filled her up with a bowl of mutton broth and hot buttered scones. For Kirsty there was always a kindly welcome at Bankhead; yet the Sandersons’ generosity made her uneasy for usually the purpose of her visit was to scrounge a piece of tackle or the loan of a plough on behalf of her boss, Duncan Clegg.
Not for the first time Mr Sanderson had said, ‘Tell Clegg I’ll expect a hire fee for the beast in future. If his horse is sick it’s his own blessed fault. If he fed the poor brute it’d thrive and do the job for him. Will you tell him what I say, Kirsty?’
‘I will, Mr Sanderson.’
‘By the look o’ you, you could do wi’ some fattenin’ yourself, lassie.’
‘I’m fat enough as it is.’
‘Aye, you’ve a shape t’ you now, right enough.’ Mr Sanderson had grinned. ‘I can understand why you’ve turned young Nicholson’s head.’
‘Who says I have?’
‘The lad told me hisself.’
‘Craig Nicholson’s a daft loon.’
Mr Sanderson had laughed, his warm brown eyes crinkling at the corners. ‘Ach, I’ll spare your blushes, Kirsty. I was young m’self once, though you’d never think it to look at me now. Will I have to brush my lum hat for a weddin’ soon?’
‘Weddin’? Never.’
‘Would Craig Nicholson not be a good catch?’
‘Craig will not be for me.’
Mr Sanderson might have teased her further, but the reason why Craig would never be for her had dawned on the farmer at that moment. Tactfully he changed the subject. It was not that Kirsty would not have had Craig for a husband, but that the Nicholsons would not permit their first-born to court, let alone marry, a girl who had come from the Baird Home, a girl without a shred of pedigree or standing, though the Nicholsons themselves lived in a rented cottage that was only marginally better than Duncan Clegg’s run-down dwelling.
Bankhead Mains was different. At the Mains there was an air of prosperity and endeavour. The
chug-chug-chug
of new steam-powered machinery from the long shed was the heartbeat of the place. If only she had been given out to the Sandersons and not to the Cleggs, how different her life might have been. But in 1889, when Kirsty, at ten, had been old enough for fostering, the Sandersons had a legion of sons and daughters about the Mains and had no room for a child-hand. Without a family, the Cleggs had room in plenty and, on the surface, a better claim.
At first Kirsty had been pleased to leave the Baird, a bleak, institutional building on the outskirts of Maybole. She had imagined that the Cleggs had picked her because they liked her, and might in time come to care for her as if she was their own. But Duncan and Mavis Clegg had not wanted a surrogate daughter, only a pair of hands to labour about the house and farm. For seven years grindingly hard work had been Kirsty’s lot. Only her schooling, insisted upon by the district truant officer, had given her relief from the isolation of Hawkhead. At Dunnet school she had come into contact with children of her own age, Craig Nicholson among them. The day after her thirteenth birthday, however, as soon as she had earned her Elementary Merit Certificate, the Cleggs had pulled her out of school and Hawkhead’s dismal hills had closed about her like the walls of a prison.
There had been other drastic changes in the course of that year too. Mavis Clegg had fallen ill of a stomach disorder and had been dead before Doctor Pollock could come to a proper decision about treatment. Soon after Mrs Clegg’s funeral there had been an enquiry into Kirsty’s ‘moral welfare’ at Hawkhead. Duncan Clegg had foreseen the authorities’ concern and had lugged Kirsty’s mattress from the cottage loft into the bothy which he had freshened up with a lick of whitewash and a dab of paint. He had even hammered together a box-bed for her and purchased new blankets and sheets to impress the inspectors and had thus managed to convince the delegation from the Baird Home that he thought of Kirsty as his own child and that it would be a cruel stroke to separate her from her ‘home’ so soon after the loss of the only ‘real’ mother she had ever known. Kirsty had not had enough gumption to refute the farmer’s lies. Shyness had been taken for adolescent ingratitude. She had been given a solemn lecture by Mrs Ashton-Clarke on the blessedness of charity and left to slave for old widower Clegg.
Hail riddled down on Kirsty’s shoulders. Even Nero, the muscular Clydesdale, felt the nip through his hairy hide. He halted abruptly in his tracks. Nero was a docile giant, well used to handling. Kirsty had borrowed him so often from Bankhead that she had learned to speak his language. Heavy horses responded best to cajoling though control rested in the short line between bit ring and the handler’s fingers.
Kirsty held the rope with a light grip and stepped forward to show herself in front of Nero’s leather blinkers. ‘G’ay on, lad, g’ay on wi’ ye.’
The Clydesdale shook his head, not petulantly, but to loose the cold sticky little grains that adhered to his muzzle hairs. Grumbling his tongue over the bit, he snuffled in discomfort.
‘Wheesht, y’ great lump,’ said Kirsty gently.
Nero regarded the girl dolefully. He dwarfed her completely and might, if he wished, tug the line from her grasp without effort and slap away down the hill to his clean warm stable. But he had been trained by Hinchcliffe, the Sandersons’ wily old horseman, and was too well placed in Bankhead’s comfort stakes to have rebellious tendencies.
‘A touch o’ hail’ll not melt you,’ Kirsty told him. ‘If you’ll stir those muckle great hoofs we’ll be home in five minutes.’
She tightened the line. Nero gave an enormous nod and started again up the track towards the outline of the farm that showed like a charcoal tracing through thin grey cloud.
Hawkhead was hardly the vision Kirsty had had of a home when she had lain in her iron cot in the dormitory at the Baird. She had imagined carpets and gas-lamps and a plump woman in a pinafore setting a table with china plates; laughter and kisses before sleep. There had been none of that from the Cleggs. Even Mavis had been severe and undemonstrative, more like a twin to her husband than a wife.
The bare wind-swept hill was a stupid place to build a farmhouse, but common sense had never been all that common in the farming community and the farmstead’s high situation had been useful sixty years ago for catching the first and last light, so Mrs Dwyer, Kirsty’s teacher, had told her. But not even Mrs Dwyer could explain why Duncan and Mavis Clegg hated everything about them, as if life was, and always had been, an insupportable burden. It could not be poverty; the Cleggs were not on the crumbling cliff of penury. Though Hawkhead was a small holding and rough, other farms in the district of similar substance managed to provide a decent living for the tenants. Dimly Kirsty realised that Duncan Clegg enjoyed his hardship and was freed by it from responsibility. She felt only a watery pity for the man, and, these past months, a growing distrust.