The Good Provider (2 page)

On reaching the barn Kirsty found Clegg waiting for her at the door of the byre. There was no milking-herd now. After Mavis’s death Duncan had disposed of the cows and based his meagre economy on raising and selling cattle and sheep, an activity which, as he practised it, took very little effort.

He wore a filthy tweed vest under a calico jacket whose best parts were the patches that Kirsty had stitched over the tears. His trousers were greasy and stiff with dirt. A cloth cap was tugged half over his face and his hands, as usual, were stuffed deep in his pockets. Kirsty thought of him as an old man, but he was not much above fifty, fifteen years or so younger than Mr Sanderson. His grey hair was thick and matted and stubble merged with an untrimmed moustache. He was sober – he seldom touched strong drink – and he watched Kirsty with a sly squint as she steered the horse to the stable. This past year Kirsty had had the prickly feeling that Duncan Clegg was spying on her not as a master might spy on a servant to keep the work up to the mark but for reasons more secret and sinister. Slowing the Clydesdale to a walk, she hesitated.

‘Where the hell have you been, missie?’ Clegg demanded, his words measured and accusatory.

‘To Bankhead, Mr Clegg, where I was sent.’

‘Aye, an’ where else?’

‘No place else.’

‘You went to the Nicholsons’, did ye not?’

‘It’s three miles from Bankhead to the Nicholsons’,’ Kirsty protested.

‘Three miles is only a skip for a young lout wi’ nastiness on his mind.’

‘I – I don’t know what you mean, Mr Clegg,’ Kirsty said.

‘Did you not contrive t’ meet
him
then?’

‘I – I saw Mr Sanderson, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Damned well you know what I mean. I mean yon Nicholson tyke.’

Duncan Clegg had slandered Craig before. How the farmer had found out that Craig and she had been school sweethearts was beyond her. Mr Clegg was seldom in village company, except at market. Certainly she had given him no hint of her feelings for Craig Nicholson. And Craig knew better than to show his face within a mile of Hawkhead. Mr Clegg was afraid that she would one day marry Craig and he would lose his unpaid servant. He would be hard pushed to wheedle another orphan from Baird Home since he was a widower now and single men were not trusted to make good masters.

Kirsty said, ‘Mr Sanderson told me t’ tell you that you canna have the plough horse again unless you pay a hire fee. I think he means it this time.’

‘Damn an’ blast the greedy bastard,’ Clegg said. ‘Is he not rich enough? An’ me wi’ a poor sick beast an’ no ploughin’ done.’

‘It’s cold,’ said Kirsty, who did not like to hear the Sandersons maligned. ‘I’d best dry Nero and give him his feed.’

Nero was not the only creature in the yard who was damp and miserable. Though the hail shower had dwindled away, twilight shimmered with the promise of frost and the dark blue wind was wintry. Kirsty shivered. She turned to draw Nero into the stable to find him a stall and brush him down. She would have to check on poor Mustard who lay weary and wheezing and on Trimmer, a raddled old horse who would be teamed with Nero tomorrow on the heavy plough to break hard ground west of the hill.

Clegg jerked his hands from his pockets.

‘Give it here, the rope. I’ll see him in.’

Startled by the man’s sudden movement Nero shied and it was all Kirsty could do to hold the horse.

She stiffened when Duncan Clegg’s thick fingers touched her neck and squeezed her hair.

He said, ‘Aye, you’re wet too. I’m not wantin’ you keelin’ over on me. You’d better dry off. Down to the skin.’

She had been strapped by him when she was younger, skirts up and drawers down to her ankles, but she had not been forced through the humiliating ritual of punishment since Mavis died. He clouted her with his fist now and then or stabbed a kick at her backside but he had never before laid a fondling hand on her.

She stepped back.

Clegg’s hand remained in mid-air, floating and uncertain.

Thickly, he said, ‘I’ll be needin’ my supper soon, so be bloody quick doin’ what you have t’ do.’

She handed him the rope at once, turned around the butt of the hay barn and entered the bothy that clung to the barn’s gable end. She closed the door and rattled the latch so that Mr Clegg might hear it. The latch was not a lock, of course, but it provided an illusion of privacy and, with the room’s only chair propped against the door, she felt secure enough in the bothy.

At seventeen Kirsty was not ignorant about sexual matters. She had heard precocious gossip in the Infant Girls’ playground at Dunnet school, stories of lassies who had teased ploughmen and had been flung on their backs and had had their skirts knotted over their heads and been given more than they had bargained for; had heard of farmers on outlying steadings who took servant-girls as ‘extra’ wives, and slept three to a bed. On one of her infrequent visits to the mart at Cawl she had encountered a young girl of fourteen, a farm servant like herself, waddling fat with child and had been shocked to see the girl’s master, a respectable man and a kirk elder, smirk and swagger when his brethren congratulated him on his virility and prodded at the poor lass as if she was no better than a dumb brute come into season for the pleasure of the bull. The sight had turned Kirsty cold with fear and anger and she had snapped at Mr Clegg on the road home and had had her ear slapped for her impudence.

At least the girl had known the name of the father of her bairn. Kirsty did not know which of the wild lads of Girvan harbour had spawned her.

It was said that bastards bred bastards and Kirsty Barnes’s lineage seemed to bear out that cynical adage. She was the bastard daughter of a bastard mother who had been, in her day, a ward of the parish too, put out to serve a fish-curer at the age of nine. But Kirsty’s mother, who had had a thrawn red-headed streak in her, had evaded monotonous servitude and drifted into night trade about the pubs and taverns of Carrick until she died in a tinkers’ camp on the low shore south of Girvan when Kirsty was less than a year old. In storybooks virtue inevitably triumphed over circumstances. But in the real world, Kirsty had already learned, victory usually went the other way. All she knew of her mother had been imparted in righteous tones by Mrs Bream, wife of the warden of the Baird Home for Orphans, before Kirsty was of an age to be boarded.

She propped the chair against the door and breathed a little sigh of relief.

The bothy was an improvement on the loft of the cottage, though it could hardly be called comfortable. There was no stove, only a grate inset into the wall. Kindling and coals were doled out on strict ration by Duncan Clegg who expected Kirsty to spend her evenings in the farm kitchen, sharing his hearth, while she did his sewing, mending and ironing. She hated the winter, shut up from dusk to bedtime in Mr Clegg’s company. She went to bed early, even for a country girl, crossing to the bothy about eight or half past, though she would not find sleep until ten or eleven o’clock and would lie in the darkness listening to the rats skiffing and scratching along the hay barn’s rafters or, distantly, old Mustard wheezing in his stall.

The only item of furniture that Kirsty could call her own was a small pinewood chest that the Baird had gifted her on her departure. The chest contained her clothes, such as they were, two lengths of hair-ribbon that Craig had given her last Christmas and ten hand-drawn cards that marked various festivals, including St Valentine’s Day. Clegg did not know about the ribbons and cards which she hid from his prying eyes not in but under the chest, wrapped in a sheet of clean newspaper. Sometimes on dreary winter nights she would take out the ribbons and tie her hair in a fancy style and stare at the cards and think of Craig and how it might have been if she had not been a product of the Baird or if she had been fostered to a decent family like the Sandersons and not stuck with the Cleggs.

She opened the lid of the chest and took out stockings and a pair of flannel drawers. There was only a faint glint of twilight in the bothy’s tiny window now and she fumbled for matches and lit the stump of candle that stood in a dish by a jagged triangle of mirror on the shelf above the hearth. She had found the broken mirror on the Dunnet dump four or five years ago and, with a young girl’s natural vanity, had brought it home and cherished it ever since. She studied her reflection soberly. She was, she supposed, pretty enough, though her nose was too flat for her liking. She had light brown hair tinted with auburn and eyes that Craig said were green, though she did not believe him, and a tiny bridge of permanent freckles across her cheeks. In heavy skirt and bodice, however, she looked as old and dumpy as one of the peasant figures carved into the lintel of the
Star of Rabbie Burns
, a public house on the Maybole Road.

Bracing herself, Kirsty stripped off her damp garments. She seated herself on the side of the cot and rubbed her bare legs with a rough towel. Standing again, she rubbed her shoulders, stomach and breasts until her skin tingled and glowed. By candlelight she glimpsed herself in the broken mirror. For once her hair seemed almost lustrous. She flung back her head and worked the towel, arched her back and let her loosened hair fly thick about her face then, before the cold could reach for her again, swiftly turned and picked up her stockings.

The sudden movement caught him out. For an instant his features were visible in the window. Kirsty gasped. She clasped the stockings to her body and gaped at the square of glass. But he had ducked out of sight and vanished. She had recognised him, though; Mr Clegg had been spying on her, ogling her nakedness. She shuddered as if a cockroach had crawled upon her, and without hesitation flung herself into her clothes.

She was seething with so much anger that she lost perspective on her position at Hawkhead, and her common sense. She stamped out of the bothy, crossed the yard, flung open the door of the cottage and stalked inside to confront the farmer.

‘How dare you!’ she shouted. ‘D’you take me for a peepshow? How could you be so wicked?’

‘Shut your damned mouth,’ Clegg told her, without a trace of contrition.

‘I will not. God, if you ever try that again I – I’ll tell –’

Kirsty’s threat was smothered, her anger changed to fear.

He stood by the fire, jacket and vest removed, three buttons of his trouser front unfastened. He had not run from her window out of shame, Kirsty realised, but out of necessity.

Duncan Clegg believed that she belonged to him. He believed that he could take her by right and that the age-old excuse would stand up if she ever dared open her mouth and accuse him; he would claim that she had led him on.

He said as much now. ‘Struttin’ before me like a bloody trollop. Night after bloody night, flauntin’ yourself. I’ll say it was you came an’ begged me. My word against yours. Everybody in these parts knows fine what sort o’ stock you come from. A whore’s bastard.’

It would indeed be Kirsty’s word against Clegg’s if she made a public complaint against him. Mr Sanderson might take her side in the matter but most folk would believe the man. Doubt would be cast, dirt would cling. Craig would despise her. Duncan Clegg had her in a vice. Once she had been demeaned, he could treat her as he wished, do anything to her and she would be powerless to prevent it.

Rage at the injustice of it flowed within her. She would not surrender to him, not give him what he wanted no matter what it cost her or what folk thought.

She turned on her heel.

‘I’m goin’,’ she said. ‘Leavin’.’

Clegg was too quick for her. He grabbed her hair and the stuff of her dress and dragged her back.

Screaming, Kirsty struggled against his strength. She had supposed that her boss was feeble, but years of labour had left him with a wiry strength that far exceeded hers. She could not fend him off. She struggled ineffectually, appalled at the sudden attack, knowing that if he wished he might take her here and now, throw her to the floor and enter her as easily as he might drive a stake into soft turf. The man’s casual brutality sickened her. He thrust an arm between her legs. Kirsty screamed again.

‘
Shut your damned mouth
.’

She continued to scream.

He struck her with his fist, dazing her.

She sagged against the table. Once more he struck her, flat-handed, and pushed her down on to the stone.

Instinctively Kirsty sought to protect her stomach with her forearms but she had been weakened by the blow and could not fend him off.

Clegg dropped to his knees. He snared her wrists, stretched her arms above her head. He nuzzled his face against her throat, dragged his lips to her mouth. She tasted stale sweat and smelled his foul breath. She gagged. Amused by her reactions, Clegg chuckled. His eyes glinted and seemed to have a spark in them as if her helplessness had awakened forgotten emotions. Struggling, Kirsty stared up at him, then went limp.

She let him paw and fondle her breasts, trail his tongue across her lips. She did not even resist when he bundled her skirts over her hips and exposed thighs and belly. She lay still as a leaf on a pond, yielding to his wishes.

Clegg did not recognise danger in her passivity. He sat back on his heels and impatiently fumbled with his trouser buttons. He was stupidly self-assured and, when exposed, glanced down at himself smugly. In that moment of inattention Kirsty saw her chance. She drove her foot like a piston into the pit of his stomach.