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  ‘So you think we should throw in the towel?’ Duncan asked Josie angrily, while Kirsten was out of earshot.

  ‘I never said that.’

  ‘You’re weakening.’

  ‘Not me. But these poor women are. They’re starving. And you promised that Nettie Boyle I would take something down to her tonight. Where am I to find it?’

  ‘We can spare something.’

  ‘We’ve always got to “spare something”. I’ve “spared something” till the cupboard’s bare.’

  Kirsten came in with the kettle and heard the last words. As she pushed the vessel down on the coals to boil, her eyes were bright with determination.

  ‘I’ll go up the farm after dark and steal some turnips. That’s what you said you did when you were little, Josie, isn’t it, and there were times like these?’

  Duncan laughed.

  ‘You can’t do that. Not someone like you.’

  ‘Can’t I? I’ll take a bucket and a sack and get some coal while I’m about it.’

  ‘Where’ll you get the coal?’ he humoured her.

  ‘Off the bing. Off the wagons at the pithead.’

  ‘You’ll get pinched for stealing.’

  ‘I’m only taking what belongs to the Rows. It isn’t like stealing. Not real stealing.’

  Josie was going round the room, making up a small packet of tea, taking a heel of bread out of the bread tin, gathering a few potatoes together and scraping dripping from a dish. She counted some lumps of coal carefully from the bucket at the fireside into an older, more battered bucket.

  ‘I’ll take these down to Nettie.’ She was soon back, looking happier, and shared the unsweetened tea with Duncan and Kirsten. It had little white lumps floating on top. The milk had gone off. There was nothing to eat with the tea.

  Kirsten rose resolutely when she’d finished and said, ‘I’m off, then. Where’s that sack you had? And the bucket?’

  Josie glared at her.

  ‘Don’t play at being poor. It isn’t a game.’

  ‘Aren’t you coming with me?’

  ‘Not me. He can go if he likes.’ She jerked her head towards Duncan.

  ‘Will you come?’

  ‘What’s the matter? Feared of the dark?’

  She didn’t answer him. White-faced, she stomped off down the back of the Rows. It was a moonless night, the dark soft and warm, like a furry animal. Everyone was in bed; there wasn’t a lamp or candle still burning. Ahead lay the small mountain of earthworks the pit had regurgitated: the bing. Small areas where spontaneous combustion had occurred glowed in the dark with a sinister appeal. She knew barefoot children scrabbling for coal there had been burned and scarred. She would have to be careful.

  The soft thud of boots sounded behind her and Duncan’s voice said in her ear, ‘She says to come with you. I’d rather be in my bed.’

  Relief flowed through her. But she was still a little angry at his lack of practicality and she walked on, saying nothing, stumbling over stones and ridges in the dark. The pink saugh growing at the foot of the bing brushed her skirts as she climbed. He came behind her, slithering, grunting annoyance.

  ‘Where do we begin?’ he demanded.

  Her sharp eyes had picked out where the children scavenged, near a spot where the bing alternately smoked and smouldered. There was a little light from the smouldering and her eyes had grown more used to the dark. And fingers could become amazingly skilled at telling slate from stone and stone from coal. The sack began to fill up and even Duncan became absorbed by the task and contributed handfuls of small, but burnable, lumps.

  At last, her bad temper evaporated, Kirsten straightened. She turned and looked at the night all around her. A sense of its mystery, combined with a memory of its childhood terrors, assailed her. She said, almost to herself, ‘How beautiful is night.’

  ‘Southey, isn’t it?’ said Duncan, by her side. ‘“No mist obscures, nor cloud …” I’ve forgotten the rest’ They scuttered carefully down the bing side, braking by turning their feet sideways, carrying the heavy sack between them. Kirsten could just make out the shadow of the wagons on their banking leading from the pit. They were loaded with coal, ready for transporting in the morning. Blackleg coal.

  ‘Leave it,’ Duncan advised her.

  She rattled the bucket. ‘I won’t take much. Just a few good lumps. They will never be missed.’ She jumped up on the wagon buffers, felt about under the tarpaulins for lumps she could grasp, and heaved them down to the track where Duncan stood. Meekly he stowed them in bucket and sack. She jumped down again, dusting her hands with sighs of satisfaction.

  ‘Now for the turnips.’

  ‘Leave them,’ he advised again.

  But on the way home they had to pass the turnip field and she struggled through a hole in the hedge, returning with an armful of hard, rooty vegetables. She was filled with a heady sense of accomplishment.

  ‘What did you say about getting me a radical education?’ she challenged Duncan. He began to chuckle, and she joined in. Between laughter and the weight of their burdens, they had to stop for breath. They could scarcely see each other in the pitch black. But when hands touched or breath landed on a cheek, each was very aware of the other’s presence.

  Chapter Three

  Kirsten struggled up from sleep to the sound of a teaspoon being rattled noisily against a cup. It was old Mrs Fleming’s way of telling her it was time she was up. She peered from the womb-like security of the recessed bed and saw that her hostess, having risen from a twin bed next to hers, was tucking into a fresh, boiled egg while the yolk ran, deliciously tempting, on to a piece of toasted soda scone.

  Kirsten dressed hurriedly and joined Kate at the table. There was a boiled egg for her, too, the first that week. ‘You can’t run the cutter for everybody in Dounhead, without something inside you,’ said Kate. ‘So eat up.’

  The girl had grown to enjoy these morning tête-à-têtes with Duncan’s mother. They were like an oasis of gracious comfort in days filled with making soup in the big wash-house boilers, ladling it out to longer and longer queues, and then setting out to cadge bones, meat, barley, vegetables from any source that could spare them for next day. The soup was the only thing that kept the strike going. That, and the potatoes that were so plentifully harvested that year.

  ‘I think Josie’s looking worn out,’ said Kate now. ‘This strike has taken more out of her than anybody, I think.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ queried Kirsten.

  ‘Because she gives away more than anybody else,’ said Kate. ‘She would give her very life for Duncan and what Duncan believes is right.’

  Kirsten could think of nothing to say. She felt a little hurt and aggrieved that Kate had not paid tribute to her own sacrifices. Not that she had not made them gladly, but —

  ‘Josie wasn’t the lass he picked for a wife,’ Kate was confiding now. ‘There was Lilias, the daughter of our minister, the Reverend Galbraith, and Duncan’s heart was always set on her. But she died, and Josie just stepped in and said she would take him on.’

  Kate was not looking at her directly and the realization grew on Kirsten that she was trying to deliver some subtle kind of warning. Kirsten made a nervous movement of denial. She knocked the knife from her plate and picked it up, staring at Kate red-faced and deeply perturbed.

  The older woman put out a hand and said in tones of great gentleness: ‘My man Findlay had an eye for the women. Not after he met me, I’ll grant you. At least not as far as I know! I don’t know about Duncan. I’m just telling you, he loved Lilias and he got Josie. He might think he’s missing something. But he’s wed to Josie. And I think a lot of her.’ She smiled. ‘And of you.’

  Kirsten went blundering down the Rows later to see Duncan and Josie, her mind caught up in a nexus of emotions she could not untangle. Surely it was obvious to everyone that the one thing that had brought her out to Dounhead was the strike and the wish to help the poor? Surely no one had done more, not even Jos
ie? She had scrubbed vegetables till her fingers were rough and dyed. She had gone scrambling on her hands and knees for coal. But then the memory of that night, out in the dark, alone with Duncan, came back to reproach her with its intimacy and laughter.

  She was already quiet and thoughtful when she lifted the latch on the cottage door and went in. Duncan’s back was to her and he did not turn round. Combing the baby’s hair, Josie looked up and said tonelessly, ‘It’s over, then. The men are going back.’

  Kirsten cried then, scalding quick tears of rage and disappointment. ‘We can’t give in,’ she wept. ‘Not after six weeks. It’ll all just have to be fought for another day.’ She looked round the cluttered, untidy room that had become like home to her and grasped at the recollection of recent days when she had been needed and useful as never before in her life. She felt a terrible hollowness then at the thought of going back to those big, spacious rooms near the university.

  Josie was looking at her drily. ‘It’s not whether “we” or “you” give in,’ she admonished. ‘It’s the folk in the Rows. And they’ve had enough of the Tattie Strike. There’s to be a meeting with Lachie Balfour at the pithead this evening.’

  ‘Can I come?’ Kirsten asked Duncan quickly.

  He shook his head. She was about to argue, when he said firmly, ‘The men wouldn’t stand for it. They’d chuck you out. It’s not politics now, after all. It’s a matter of getting back to work.’

  The baby, Carlie, sensing drama among the grown-ups, threw her little tin mug and feeding tube down on the hearth with a clatter, staggered to her feet and announced with beguiling aplomb, ‘Me good girl.’ For once, nobody heard or smiled. Her father went about the house for the rest of the day with a dark and silent face.

  Kirsten stayed with Josie while Duncan was at the meeting. They sat in the kitchen with a glimmer of light from the fire. There was no paraffin for the lamp. Kirsten talked about her theories for a better deal for women, while Josie told her tales about the women she knew in the Rows: women kept down by too frequent childbirth, abused by drunken husbands, defeated in the constant struggle towards ‘respectability’.

  Kirsten was on the point of leaving to spend her last night at Kate’s cottage when there was a commotion farther down the Row. At first it was shouts arid scuffling feet and then lights swayed outside the window and the door crashed open.

  Duncan held a lantern aloft as four men carried an inert figure into the room.

  ‘What’s happened?’ cried Josie.

  ‘It’s Lachie.’ Duncan pushed the lantern into her hand and pantomimed that she should hold it up while they brought Lachie in to the chair by the fire. Kirsten screamed as she saw that a great gaping wound on Lachie’s forehead was pouring blood.

  ‘It was big Dan Miller,’ said Duncan. ‘Lost his head and started a fight with the blacklegs. Lachie got between them and he got this blow with a pick-handle that was meant for somebody else.’ His grim face looked down at the stricken man. ‘I’ve sent for the doctor and for Tansy. We couldn’t take him home to Dounhead House till he’s had attention.’

  ‘Lay him on the floor,’ ordered Josie. Somehow her hands were full of bed-linen, which she was tearing into strips. She made a pad and, bringing the edges of the wound together, applied it. Kirsten covered Lachie with a blanket Nettie Boyle came to the door with an armful of firewood someone had given her. ‘Take it,’ she urged Josie. ‘You’ll need to boil a kettle.’ Someone else brought candles. They stood around outside the door, anxious faces peering in. A few doors down, Dan Miller was giving his muddled version of the incident to anyone who would listen, while his wife nursed their youngest in a shawl and upbraided him in a constant, keening shriek. ‘I told you to keep out of trouble. Where did you get the drink?’

  Tansy arrived, driving herself in the gig, and the crowd outside the door parted respectfully to let her in. She fell on her knees beside Lachie, seeing the blood everywhere and his dreadful pallor. She looked up at Duncan and said with a deadly calm, ‘You did this.’

  Josie raised her up, sat her in a chair and put a cup of tea into her hands. ‘Lachie got between two men in a fight. The blow was never meant for him.’

  ‘Is he dead?’ Tansy looked at her fearfully. Somehow she had always liked and trusted Josie. The relationship went back to their childhood and had not been affected by their difference in station.

  Josie shook her head.

  ‘No, no. Of course not.’ It sounded more encouraging than she felt. ‘The doctor will be here soon.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he move?’ moaned Tansy. She fell to her knees once more, picking up an unresistant hand, ‘Oh, my Lachie. Don’t leave me. Lachie, do you hear?’

  ‘Get away to your beds.’ It was the stentorian voice of Dr Pettigrew, ordering the crowd away from the door. He came into the kitchen, hauled Tansy unceremoniously to her feet and indicated that she should be taken into the front room.

  ‘He can’t be moved from here tonight,’ he told Duncan, when he had examined Lachie. ‘He’s very weak from loss of blood. Can he be taken into your front room?’ Duncan nodded.

  Tansy had recovered her composure. She came into the kitchen now and asked the doctor quietly, ‘How bad is he?’

  ‘Bad enough!’

  ‘Will he die?’

  He glared at her with his hardened, professional expression.

  ‘Who am I to say? Ask the brute who did it. Ask the Lord.’ Relenting, he added, ‘He has a strong constitution. Thank God for that.’

  The night passed in a strange, nightmare blur of sensations for everyone concerned. Kirsten made tea at intervals while Josie helped the doctor, and Kate, who had hurried from her cottage at the news, sat with her arms round Tansy, just as she had done when she was a child. Sometimes a head would nod in sleep, a figure stir as cramp attacked a limb.

  When dawn was streaking the sky, Pettigrew put his head round the door and beckoned Tansy. She went into the room and saw that Lachie had regained consciousness. His mouth stretched weakly in a parody of a smile.

  *

  Tansy Balfour rubbed glycerine and rosewater into her hands, briefly admiring their pallor and softness. Before going in to see her husband, she had changed into his favourite dress, the peacock blue with its kilted frills and the foam of lace at the neck. She touched her piled mass of brown hair without approval — it seemed to have lost some of its natural curl in all these days and weeks of worry.

  Lifting the lines of her face into a smile, she carried the Glasgow Herald into the invalid’s bedroom. Safely installed in his own home, with his own nurses, Lachie was making a slow recovery. But it had been touch and go. For a week he had hovered on the borderline between life and death.

  He had changed mentally, in some subtle way she could not define but which was tied up somehow with his attitude towards her. Almost as though he blamed her for what had happened. She came from the Rows, didn’t she? He was harsh and autocratic with her, blaming her if there was the slightest hitch or error in his daily routine.

  Pettigrew had advised patience, saying that the blow had been so severe that she might well find Lachie changed in temperament. It was lucky he was not paralysed. Keep him cheerful, he had admonished. It was not always easy.

  ‘There is a most ridiculous advertisement here,’ she said now, tapping the paper. ‘It says “Vessel Lost, Stolen or Strayed”. It seems that some man called Walker chartered a ship called the Ferret, loaded her with coal, wine and groceries, took on a crew of runners — and then sailed from the Clyde and has not been heard of again!’

  She watched him closely to see if there was a glimmer of interest, then went on with determined cheerfulness:

  ‘Glasgow is full of theories about the Ferret. A ship can’t just disappear. Some say it could have gone down in the Bay of Biscay, but sailors discount that. British consulates all over the world have been asked to keep an eye open for it. I think it must be a sort of pirate ship, don’t you, up to all sorts of no good!’


  ‘I am not greatly interested,’ Lachie averred.

  Tansy sat down on his bed and took his hand in hers.

  ‘Will it interest you, then, to know that Clemmie and Jack are planning a splendid reception for Paterson and Honoria, with all sorts of Glasgow luminaries, and the whole family are invited, too?’

  ‘You mean Duncan and Josie as well?’

  ‘They’re family, aren’t they?’

  ‘Duncan and Paterson don’t hit it off. You told me so yourself.’

  ‘That was as children. They are different now.’

  ‘I have a theory. We don’t change as we get older, just become more ourselves.’

  She touched his face tenderly, glad to see him more animated.

  ‘My mother will be coining. And Honoria’s father, the minister.’

  ‘I won’t be going. I won’t be well enough.’

  ‘Of course you will. The doctor says all you need now is rest and care, and something to interest you.’

  He threw the paper to the foot of the bed in a petulant gesture.

  ‘Have you heard how things are at the pit?’

  ‘All’s quiet. There’s rumblings through in Ayrshire, but no troubles here.’

  He stared straight ahead of him, with that rather fixed intensity she had come to fear. He was still deathly pale, his strong, aquiline features blurred and distorted by illness and the body that had made such skilful love to her collapsed in on itself, folded round a skeletal frame. She held down a hysterical terror, a fear that nothing could ever restore him to her as he had been.

  ‘Darling.’ There was longing and despair in her voice. She leaned forward and kissed him, feeling her body stir with need for him. She leaned her head lightly on his chest, waiting for him to give some sign of reciprocal feeling.

  ‘We’re getting out of it,’ he said above her head.

  Without lifting her head, she waited, going cold with apprehension.

  ‘We’re getting out of the pit. I’m selling my shares. We’re going away from here.’

  ‘Oh, no.’ She sat up straight, looking at him with total disbelief.