The Hamiltons of Ballydown (19 page)

‘Did you tell them your grandfather was a Catholic when they made you a member, Jamie?’ Hannah asked quietly. ‘Did you mention that your uncles and aunts are Catholic? And all your cousins? That some of them are even farmers who do happen to be poor however hard they work?’ she went on, her tone growing ever colder.

‘That’s hardly going to bother you, Hannah,’ Jamie burst out. ‘You’re making sure
you’ll
never be poor. Da puts you in a silk dress and Ma gets you a rich husband and they leave me to walk to my work, with not enough money to buy a round of drinks.’

‘That’s enough, Jamie,’ John shouted, getting to his feet. ‘You’ll apologise to your sister for what
you’ve just said. If you’re short of money, it’s your own fault. Haven’t I asked you every time you’ve come home if you needed anythin’, forby payin’ your lodgin’s and the bill for the suits, and the shoes and so on? What you get for your pocket from Harlands is more than I earned when your mother and I had you and Hannah and your Granny to keep. How wou’d I know it wasn’t enough, unless you tell me?’ he asked, sitting down as Rose put a hand on his.

‘I shouldn’t have to come begging,’ he shot back. ‘Did Sarah and Hannah have to come crawling to you for all their smart dresses?’

‘No, Jamie, they didn’t,’ Rose said quietly. ‘But it was clear what was needed and we did make most of them ourselves. If you’d told us what
you
needed, you could have had it. Have we ever refused you anything if we could give it to you?’ she asked, trying to keep her voice calm and steady.

‘No, you haven’t,’ he said grudgingly. ‘But you don’t seem very interested in
my
well being and my career. All I hear about when I come home is your grand friends up the hill and across the water.’

‘We don’t need to ask about
your
career, Jamie,’ said Sarah furiously, ‘you tell us about it all the time. All you can think of is Junior Manager,’ she went on, ‘and who’s useful and who’s not. I suppose you joined the Lodge, to get in with the right people.’

Rose shot her a warning glance, but the idea that Ma had got Hannah a rich husband had made Sarah
hopping mad and she wasn’t finished yet.

‘You haven’t apologised to Hannah,’ she said, her eyes flashing with fury. ‘Or to Ma or Da. You’ve said horrible things about Da putting her in a silk dress and Ma getting her a husband. As if Ma would do such a thing even if Hannah needed her to. Come on, Jamie, we’re all waiting,’ she insisted, fastening her two bright eyes upon him.

‘Why should I apologise to anyone? I’m entitled to my own opinions,’ he said, glaring round the table. ‘You’re all so comfortable, living out here in the countryside, eating good dinners and going away on holidays to these English aristocrats that don’t give tuppence for us here in the north. Where would the province be without the hard work of people in industry to prop up agriculture in places like this?’ he demanded, his voice hectoring and bitter. ‘Where will you all be if the likes of me and my friends don’t try to hold on to our Protestant birthright? You’ll not be so comfortable, or have life so easy, if we end up with Home Rule. You’re just sitting back leaving the struggle to someone else,’ he said, glaring from Sam, to his father, and back again, ignoring the fact that it was Sarah who had challenged him.

‘You and Sam ought to be standing up for what Protestants have achieved in the north and not sitting back taking your ease.’

‘Does it ever occur to you Jamie, there might
be some other way of lookin’ at things?’ said John, with an effort of control.

‘No, it doesn’t. There’s no two ways of looking at what’s happening in this province. There’s only those who see the truth and those who can’t or won’t take the trouble to see for themselves. You’ve only to read your newspaper to see Redmond getting in with the likes of Ashley and Altrincham, and Salisbury no match whatever for their manoeuvring.’

‘What do you know about Lord Ashley, Jamie, except what you want to think?’ Sarah demanded witheringly. ‘He’s been working half the summer with the Congested Districts Board to help poor people in the west, people like Ma’s parents, who haven’t enough land to make a living, who starve when there’s blight and get evicted if there’s no one to stand up for them. Do you care nothing about anyone else but yourself? You’ve been lucky. You wouldn’t even have survived to be in Harlands if it wasn’t for Ma and Da working to keep you fed and James Sinton paying your apprenticeship money when Ma and Da hadn’t got it. But you’ve forgotten that, haven’t you? We’d still be living in a two roomed cottage opposite the forge if it wasn’t for Ma and Da. We were
poor
, Jamie.
Poor
. Have you forgotten that?’

‘Well, we’ll all be poor again if your fine friends get their way with all of you to encourage them,’ he said, springing to his feet so violently he knocked his
chair over. ‘And I’m not staying here to be lectured by a chit of a schoolgirl. Catch yourselves on, for God’s sake, before it’s too late,’ he said, as he shoved the fallen chair out of his way, pushed past behind Hannah and Sam and banged the parlour door as he left.

There was a moment’s silence before they heard his feet on the road.

Sarah looked from Rose to John, unrepentant, but distressed by the look on their faces.

‘Sarah, would you run after him with the cake?’ Rose said, abruptly.

‘Where is it?’

‘Wrapped up ready in the larder.’

Sarah picked up Jamie’s fallen chair, slipped behind Hannah and Sam and out into the kitchen. A few moments later, they caught a glimpse of her flying past the parlour window.

Rose studied the floral border on her dinner plate and knew there was nothing she could have done, even without Sarah’s intervention. John might have tried to argue. He might have told the story of the Orange intimidation that took away his job with Thomas Scott and forced him to look for any work that would keep them fed. He might have recalled the violence in Belfast when Mary Wylie’s sister, Peggy, saw her young husband killed outside their own front door.

There would have been no point in any of it.
He would have dismissed his father’s views as old-fashioned. Only
he
had the true story, the real insight into the affairs of the day. She thought of the twelve-year-old who’d got them out of a runaway train, carried his little sister when she was exhausted and pumped spring water so vigorously for his thirsty family he’d splashed them all. That was another Jamie in another life. That Jamie was as dead as if he were buried in Grange Churchyard.

Hannah was stacking the dinner plates and John was still staring at the empty place when they heard Sarah come back. They waited silently until she came into the parlour.

‘I’ll never speak to him again,’ she burst out, tears streaming down her face, as she put a well-wrapped package in front of her mother. ‘He didn’t want to take it, and when I said you’d got up early to bake it for him before the roast went in, he took it from me and threw it in the ditch.’

‘What are we gonna do, Rose?’

Standing with her arms round Sarah, steadier now but still crying, she heard John’s voice as if from a long way away. She gave Sarah a kiss, asked her to go and make a cup of tea and suddenly found herself back in her childhood, the noise and smell of demolished cottages all around her, her father’s voice echoing in her ears. Whenever her father couldn’t solve his problem by hard work or devotion to his family, when all else failed him, he always turned to her mother with those very words.

Now it was her turn to find an answer for her man. They were not being evicted from their home, but suddenly, out of the blue, they were facing hurt and loss. She knew now Jamie had come home unwillingly and having come, he’d been confronted by a decision. His family and its history was an embarrassment to him, so he had rejected them. Whatever the future might open, here on this sunlit August afternoon, Jamie, who had been dear to
them, had been lost, not through death, which had its proper rituals of mourning, but by a deliberate rejection which left a bitter, private grief to be made known only to the closest of friends.

‘First, we’re going to have a quick cup of tea,’ she began with an encouraging smile as she looked down at him in the chair beside her. ‘Then we’re going to go down to Corbet Lough while the sun’s out. We’ll see if the swans are there. I’ve a bit of stale bread for them,’ she said, dropping a hand on his shoulder and squeezing it.

It was difficult getting Sam safely up into the trap and once he was safely settled there wasn’t much room left, so Sarah and Hannah went for their bicycles. They rode down the hill behind the trap with sunlight firing the red of the berries in the hedgerows.

The air was warm but there was a hint of the freshness of autumn. The light had that particular clarity they’d not see again till the spring. For the first time in her life Sarah asked herself how an afternoon could be so lovely when they were all so unhappy. When Da was at work, Hannah on her way to London and Sam standing on his crutches looking across at MacMurray’s cattle, she’d ask her mother and see what she said.

Meantime, the swans had appeared accompanied by a number of dirty-looking cygnets. She watched the slow, stately glide of the adult birds and
wondered whether she could get a picture if she brought her camera down to the shore one day after school.

Rose woke early next morning and couldn’t go back to sleep. She lay with her eyes closed, her mind already running through the list of things she ought to get started on immediately after breakfast. There were ‘Thank You’ letters to be written by each of them to Lady Anne. A stack of sheets that would need bleaching before they could be washed. Hannah hadn’t nearly enough underwear for ten months in Switzerland and it looked as if she’d need at least three more everyday dresses. Sarah would certainly have to have a new school pinafore before school started, for she’d grown taller and more shapely since last year. The whole house needed cleaning and the garden was full of weeds.

She went through the list again and wondered whether Elizabeth and Hugh might arrive home this week. At the thought of Elizabeth, Rose opened her eyes. She’d have to be told about Jamie. Like a dark cloud blotting out the sun, the memory of yesterday’s spoilt celebration moved across her mind and swallowed up her energy and her enthusiasm.

‘Is there nothin’ we can do, Rose?’ John had said the previous evening, staring into the fire after he’d helped Sam negotiate the stairs and Sarah and Hannah had both said goodnight.

‘Well, we could try writing to him.’

‘What would we say?’

‘We could say that many a family has had to cope with strongly differing viewpoints,’ she began sadly. ‘It’s hardly a new problem in this part of the world. It’s not impossible to agree to differ,’ she continued. ‘There were times when Sam and I nearly fell out over the Land League, especially when Harrington got shot at. But we managed to stay friends.’

‘Aye, I remember you were hard enough on him in some of your letters,’ he said, nodding. ‘What else would we say to Jamie?’

‘Well, we could reassure him he’s just as valued as the other three,’ she said slowly. ‘He seemed to me to be jealous of Hannah and Sarah and even poor old Sam in some way. It’s as if they have something he wants and can’t have, and he resents them for it.’

‘He was powerful angry about the girls’ dresses,’ said John abruptly. ‘Am I mistaken, or did his last two suits not cost more than the dresses?’

‘A great deal more,’ she agreed easily. ‘Tailoring is far more expensive than needlework. Besides, we made all but the best dresses at home and pretty fabric is nothing compared to broadcloth or tweed.’

‘So it’s not just about money, d’you think?’

‘No, I think that’s just something he’s hanging on to,’ she said, shaking her head sadly. ‘But we
could
try to put that right if you like. We could say we were sorry there’d been a misunderstanding and
send him money for the next two months. See what he says. If we apologise for our part, it would give him the chance to apologise for his.’

‘Could we do that now? Then it could go back into Banbridge with the postman in the mornin’.’

‘Would you sleep better if we wrote tonight?’ she asked, glancing at the clock and looking at him.

When he nodded sheepishly, she went to the dresser and took out her writing materials. By the time she’d written and rewritten the letter, and he’d drafted a cheque for fifty pounds, it was long past midnight and they were both grey with tiredness.

It was Sarah who solved the problem of Hannah’s everyday dresses.

‘Ma, why doesn’t she have
my
new dresses?’ she asked, when Rose spoke of shopping on Monday morning. ‘I’ve not torn them or anything, and they’ll only need the hems taken up a bit,’ she said reasonably. ‘We chose the material together, so you won’t
hate
them, will you, Hannah?’

‘No, of course not, they’re all very pretty. I could just as easily have chosen them myself, but what about
you
, Sarah?’

‘I won’t need anything much once school starts,’ she replied dismissively. ‘I’ve got my blue silk in case the Queen invites me to go to one more of her Jubilee parties,’ she said grinning, ‘but she must be fed up
with them by now. If she gets any fatter, she’ll burst.’

‘Poor old Queen Victoria,’ said Rose smiling. ‘Some people can’t help getting fatter as they get older,’ she said gently. ‘Do you really think your dresses will fit Hannah? If they do, we can replace them easily enough. It’s being so short of time is the problem. We might manage one or two, but we just can’t make three by Friday night.’

The dresses were duly tried on. For two girls who looked so very different, they fitted remarkably well, apart from the odd tuck and some extra turn up on the hems. They were ready to pack by the end of the day.

On Tuesday, when they arrived home with Hannah’s underwear and Sarah’s new uniform, they found a letter from Elizabeth sitting on the table. She and Hugh would be arriving on Friday morning and would certainly be able to come and see them and wish Hannah well sometime later in the day. Rose put the letter down, breathed a sigh of relief and began to feel distinctly easier.

The first shock of Jamie’s departure now behind her, John’s mind eased by the letter they’d written together and the prospect of being able to talk to her dear Elizabeth once more, Rose began to feel her spirits rise. With his sisters for company and all the sitting down jobs she could find him, Sam too, had begun to look more like his old self. Not surprisingly, she slept better on Tuesday night than on any night
since she’d arrived home. She came downstairs on Wednesday morning ready to scrub the dairy, bake bread, help Hannah go through her clothes list in Jamie’s empty room and weed the garden.

‘Here ye are, Ma. Post,’ said Sam, swinging expertly over the threshold and pausing by the table.

He fished down the front of his shirt and brought out a small pile of envelopes the postman had given him when he found him leaning on the field gate gazing at the misty blue outline of the mountains.

Only as he dropped them on the table did he see beneath a long, blue airmail a small, regular envelope with the thin black border that meant bad news.

‘Oh Sam, such very bad news,’ she said, looking up at him, tears in her eyes. ‘Thomas and Selina’s wee girl. The poor little creature.’

‘What’s happened to her, Ma?’ he asked, his eyes wide with concern.

‘She was playing outside the forge and a dog came up the lane,’ she began, steadily enough. ‘She put out her hand and it bit her. Sure, the bite was nothing and she was soon comforted, but when Thomas heard her cry and came and chased the dog away, he saw the foam around its jaws. He’d read in the paper about a rabid dog down at Annacramp, but he thought it had been reported to the police and shot. But it hadn’t. So he knew the worst. She took three days to die,’ she said, sitting down abruptly and bursting into tears.

‘Ach Ma, that’s desperate,’ he said, dropping one hand awkwardly on her shoulder. ‘An’ Thomas dying about the wee thing. Sure he mentions her every time he writes.’

She nodded and wiped her tears on a corner of her apron.

‘Your Granny Hannah used to say that children are only lent to you,’ she said looking up at him. ‘You have to give them back sooner or later but two is much too soon. They’ll be in a bad way,’ she said taking out her handkerchief. ‘I’ll have to write to them this afternoon.’

‘Maybe there’s better news from my Uncle,’ Sam said, nodding towards the familiar airmail envelope with its brightly coloured stamps.

Without considering at all, Rose reached for her brother’s letter. As she lifted it, the remaining envelope lay revealed, smaller and squarer than the airmail, but more substantial than the delicate, black- edged missive. Her first glance told her it was addressed in her own hand to Mr Jamie Hamilton. She stared at it, puzzled by the strong, dark lines that had been drawn firmly through the Belfast address. To the right of the deleted address in a small, well-shaped hand she read:
Mr and Mrs John Hamilton, Ballydown, Corbet, Banbridge, County Down
.

Jamie had returned their letter unopened.

Rose decided that the very worst thing about bad news was having to pass it on. They were all sitting at lunch when John asked about the morning post. There was nothing for it but to tell him what everyone else already knew. Over little Sophie Scott, he was upset and angry. He said a few harsh things about a police force that didn’t know when to use a gun and neighbours who hadn’t paid proper attention to such a real danger.

It was harder for her to see just how Jamie’s returning their letter affected him. When she told him, he said nothing, but there was a tightened of the lips and the whites of his eyes seemed suddenly more obvious. She wondered if she detected even a hint of relief, as if, having made the effort, he need struggle no more. As he picked up his cap and headed back to Rathdrum without a word, she decided that only time, or the quiet of the night, would reveal what John really thought.

‘Ma, are Elizabeth and Hugh coming for a meal on Friday?’ Hannah asked, as they cleared the table after lunch.

‘Well, I hadn’t thought that far, Hannah,’ she said honestly. ‘I expect they’ll be tired and Mrs Lappin will be expecting them. But it’s a nice idea. Would you like them to come?’ she asked, as she filled the washing up bowl at the stove. ‘It’s your last evening at home, remember.’

‘Ma, they can’t come for a meal,’ said Sarah
urgently. ‘I’ve nothing to wear except what I’ve got on and I cleaned out the stable this morning.’

‘Oh, we could shake lavender water over you,’ said Hannah laughing, ‘you look all right to me.’

‘Would you really like us to have them for a meal in the evening, Hannah?’ Rose continued. ‘They’ll have had a rest by then and we could do a cold supper with roast chicken and ham, or something like that.’

‘Yes, I really would, Ma,’ said Hannah nodding. ‘But only if you let us do the work. You’ve had enough to do this week and you still haven’t got out to weed your border.’

‘Oh Hannah, we can’t do a special meal and me turn up in my oldest dress,’ protested Sarah.

‘Well, I’ll lend you one of your own back,’ said Hannah soothingly. ‘I can pack it again before we go to bed.’

‘I think I’ve got a better idea,’ said Rose smiling, as inspiration came to her. ‘Why don’t you
both
wear your best dresses? Elizabeth was away the day they came and they were packed the next day when she came to say goodbye. Why don’t we leave her a note and tell her we’re dressing up as it’s Hannah’s last night so she can do the same,’ Rose went on enthusiastically. ‘We’ll make it a proper double celebration, a
Welcome Home
for Elizabeth and Hugh and a
Bon Voyage
for Hannah.’

Sarah’s eyes lit up at the thought of wearing her blue silk dress.

‘What about Sam? What can he wear?’ she demanded.

‘A nice clean shirt is all he needs, his trouser-and-a-half won’t show when he’s sitting down,’ said Rose laughing. ‘You could always put bows on his crutches.’

There wasn’t any possibility of forgetting what had happened at their last celebration, but on Friday afternoon at least Rose could be sure everyone who would sit round the table in the parlour would behave properly. The guests were bidden for six o’clock, an unusually early hour for an evening party, but Hannah and John had to make an early start for Dublin the following morning.

All but one of Hannah’s cases were closed and left ready in Jamie’s room. Beside them sat John’s overnight case, the outcome of an unexpected but most courteous letter from Lady Anne’s sister, Lily. The journey was tiring, she said, far too much to have to return on the same day. She would be pleased if John would stay the night in Dublin. Besides, as they were so soon to be so closely related, she would like to renew her acquaintance with him, as well as meeting his daughter.

John himself arrived home earlier than usual on Friday evening and offered to don his best coat for the occasion. He was much relieved when Hannah
pointed out that if he wore his coat then Hugh wouldn’t be able to remove his. On such a pleasant, warm evening with seven people round the table, they’d both be far too hot.