I
The summer she was ten she learned not to speak of it. She told the hens, she told the cows, she told the pond at the bottom of the field and the ducks who swam there and her pet jackdaw, Alice, but she did not tell her grandparents, Rab and Flora, or Hugh, the farm boy, or Nellie, who had helped in the house when she, Lizzie, was learning to walk and whom they still saw every week at the kirk. The first picture came on a dreich November day. Her grandmother was in the dairy, skimming milk, her grandfather in the fields, digging potatoes. She was beneath the kitchen table, making scones for her doll—she must have been three or four—when the flagstone floor and her bowl and spoon disappeared. Instead she was watching her grandfather, his shirtsleeves rolled up, scything hay in the meadow by the river. He was working his way along the bank, cutting wide swathes; one moment the hay was upright, the next fallen. At the end of the row, he stopped to sharpen the scythe. She could see his shirt clinging to his back as he ran the whetstone back and forth. He was starting on the next row when the blade bit his calf.
She was still exclaiming “No,” scrambling from beneath the table, when the kitchen door opened and her grandfather stepped into the room, carrying a basket of potatoes. As he washed them at the sink, she patted his legs, searching for the cut beneath the rough fabric of his trousers. “What is it, Lizzie?” he said. “Do I have mud on me?” She told him what she’d seen. “I’d have to be gey clumsy,” he said, “to cut myself digging tatties.” She was still wondering why she had seen a scythe, not a fork, why the sun had been shining though the sky was grey, when her grandmother returned and together they went to feed the hens. By the following July when Neil, their neighbour, carried her grandfather home in a wheelbarrow, she had forgotten the scene beneath the table. Only as Dr. Murray made dark, untidy stitches in Rab’s leg did she recall her glimpse of the meadow months before.
She thought of them as pictures because she could see everything so clearly, as if she were standing nearby, although she never saw herself. Sometimes she saw ordinary things: her grandmother choosing which hen to kill; a cow stuck in the mud by the river. She saw a picture of Nellie in a white dress at the front of the church and three months later Nellie announced she was marrying Angus. “You could have knocked me down with a feather,” her grandmother said, reporting the news at supper. Lizzie started to say she had known for weeks, but her grandfather was already talking about the sheep shearing.
All this happened at Belhaven Farm, which was in that part of Scotland called the Kingdom of Fife, surrounded on three sides by water: the Firth of Forth to the south, the North Sea to the east, the Tay estuary to the north. Fife was known for its collieries, its fishing, and its university in St. Andrews, but the farm was inland, far from the coal mines. The year of Lizzie’s birth the explorer David Livingstone died in Africa, the RMS Atlantic sank off Nova Scotia, and the Scottish Rugby Union was founded. On the farm the most notable events, besides her arrival, were the mild weather and the early harvest.
Her great-great-grandfather had bought the farm in 1807 with money he made in linen. The gently rolling land was two miles from the village of Langmuir; six miles from the market town of Cupar. He had put a new roof on the white harled farmhouse and planted the beech trees that cast too much shade in the garden. Next to the house was an apple orchard and beyond that a field where Acorn, the mare, and Ivanhoe and Rob Roy, the cart horses, grazed. The cows mostly stayed in a large field beside the farmyard. In the south corner of the field, near the gate, was the duck pond. In the north corner was a small circle of standing stones, two fallen. Down by the river Elder was the meadow where her grandfather had cut himself. Other fields, farther away, were used for turnips, potatoes, corn, barley, oats, and hay. The north pasture and the moorland belonged to the sheep.
It was her great-grandfather who had planted the rowan tree beside the door of the farmhouse to keep witches away and built the lean-to which sheltered the carts, the plough, and the harrow. The other buildings—the barn, the byre, the granary, the dairy, the henhouse, the stable, and the hayloft—were part of the original farm. Between the house and the farmyard, a track led south to the river, and north, past the lochan, to the village of Langmuir. As a child, Lizzie knew every stone and puddle and nettle. She spent her days with her grandmother, Flora, who was tall and blue-eyed and sometimes carried Lizzie on her shoulders when she went to fetch the cows. Lizzie would pat her golden knot of hair, inhale her comforting fragrance of green soap and tea. When she drew a cow in the back of The Voyage of the Beagle, Flora spanked her but kept the drawing. Next time her grandfather went to market in Cupar, he brought back a book full of blank paper and two pencils. “Now mind,” he told her, “leave my books alone.”
—
Where were her parents?
On the wall of her bedroom. Her mother had made the drawing the day they got married. Helen, wearing a dress, the folds nicely shaded, was sitting in a chair; Teddy, in his Sunday suit, stood behind her, his left hand resting on her shoulder. Lizzie seldom glanced at them, but every morning she looked at the little white house with two red doors which had belonged to Helen and which stood on her chest of drawers. In fine weather the woman came out of her door; in bad weather the man emerged; sometimes each hovered on the threshold but they could never come out at the same time. Besides the weather house and the drawing, Lizzie had inherited her mother’s border terrier, William, whom they buried in the apple orchard soon after her grandfather cut himself, and a handful of stories. Helen could undo any knot; she could imitate a thrush so that birds sang back; she had rescued a calf from drowning in the river; she was partial to gooseberry jam. About her father, she knew even less. Teddy had been a fisherman. His boat was named St. Fillan after the saint who had lived in a cave on the Fife coast and wrote by the light of his glowing left arm, but neither God nor St. Fillan had saved Teddy’s boat when the fog rolled in one October day. Seven months later Lizzie was born; twelve months later Helen died. “Not because of you,” Flora had said. “Pneumonia. Your father drowned in one way, your mother in another.”
She had the ducks and the hens for company, the orphaned lambs and calves, but whenever she and Flora went to Langmuir she gazed longingly at the girls in the school playground. At last, the August she was five, she set off to join them, wearing a clean pinafore, carrying a slice of bread and a piece of cheese for her lunch. She walked the first mile on her own, past their fields and the track that led to the lochan and Neil’s fields. Then she knocked on Dr. Murray’s door and walked the rest of the way with Morag, the oldest of his three girls. On that first day Morag hung back, afraid of the boys jostling in the playground, but Lizzie ran into the schoolroom eager to begin. The teacher, Miss Renfrew, put her in a desk next to Sarah, who lived in a house near the blacksmith’s. Her milky skin was dotted with freckles that Lizzie kept trying to count.
She liked the morning hymn, she liked writing and counting and reading and reciting and she particularly liked lunchtime, when they were free to play for half an hour. She was good at catch, fast at running; soon she knew the skipping rhymes: “Down in the Valley,” “Bluebells, Cockle Shells.” After school she was meant to walk home with Morag, but one sunny afternoon she joined a group of girls playing hopscotch. How many times had the church bell struck before she heard a voice calling, “Lizzie Craig?” As they walked along the track, Lizzie skipping to keep up, her grandmother explained she couldn’t stop and play whenever she liked. She had the hens to feed, the ducks to shut in for the night. “You’ve seen the foxes,” Flora said, “sneaking under the gate at dusk.”
She still enjoyed the games at lunch, but while she gathered the eggs she knew the other girls were whispering confidences, running in and out of one another’s houses. She was the only pupil with no sisters, no brothers. Then, one January morning the spring she turned nine, Bob, the cowman, slipped in the first snow and decided he wanted to stay home. A week later her grandfather returned from Cupar with a wheaten-haired, lanky-limbed boy wearing too-short trousers and a too-large shirt. Her grandmother cut Hugh’s hair, shortened his sleeves, and made him a bed in the seldom-used parlor. That night at supper he said cheerfully that he was the seventh of seven sons; his father, a tanner, referred to him as surplus labour. When he wasn’t working with Rab, ploughing and harrowing, planting and sowing, Hugh helped Flora with the garden and took over the milking. He let Lizzie follow him around; he whittled her pencils and praised her drawings. The farm was no longer lonely.
In May, two days before her birthday, she came home to find a box in the kitchen. A small bird, its black feathers just beginning to bristle, stared up at her with blue-grey eyes. Hugh had found the jackdaw under an ash tree, no parents, no nest in sight. He showed her how to feed it worms and grubs. All evening she kept the bird on her lap, feeling the sharp prick of its claws, stroking its neck feathers.
“What will you call it?” said Hugh.
“Alice,” she said. Last winter, they had taken turns reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland aloud.
Alice’s eyes lightened to the grey of the lochan on cloudy days. She learned to fly and accompanied Lizzie as she fed the hens and ducks. When she and her grandfather played cribbage, Alice tried to steal the wooden pegs. On her grandmother’s birthday, Lizzie tied a little paper banner to Alice’s leg: Happy Birthday, Flora. In the evenings, while Hugh milked the cows, Alice perched on a hayrack, chattering softly and ignoring the barn cats slinking around in the straw below. As soon as she had done her homework, Lizzie joined them. She told Hugh the news from school—an older boy had broken his arm and had to wear a sling; Miss Renfrew had set a surprise test on the kings and queens of England, and she had passed because he had made her recite the names so often. Hugh told her Neil was putting two of his hives in their orchard and would give them some of the honey. In the Fife Herald he had read they were building a railway bridge across the Firth of Forth. He and Lizzie both remembered the storm that had brought down the Tay Bridge. At Belhaven, they had lost a haystack and several trees.
Seated on a milking stool, Lizzie leaned her head against Viola’s dusty flank, took hold of two teats, and tried to imitate Hugh’s steady motions. Nothing happened; Viola shifted restlessly. “Why won’t she milk for me?” she said.
“You have to squeeze and pull at the same time,” Hugh said. “Like a calf needing its supper.”
She was squeezing, pulling, when Viola and the empty pail vanished. Instead she was looking at the orchard, the apples still small and green, and there was Hugh standing beside one of Neil’s hives. The bees were coming and going, their legs knobbly with pollen. Hugh was bending over a hive, lifting off the top, as she had often seen Neil do. Then he was lying on the grass while bees, too many to count, covered his face and arms. His lips were moving but there was no sound. She was wondering how the bees, with their tiny stings, could hurt Hugh, when Viola swished her tail, and the orchard was gone. A few drops of milk dribbled into the pail.
“Hugh,” she said, “will you do anything with the bees?”
“No. They mind themselves. When it’s time, Neil will show me how to get the honey.”
“Promise you won’t do it without me,” she said, and he did.
After supper, in her room, she took out her sketch pad and drew what she’d seen: the apple trees with their fruit, the hive, and Hugh lying on the ground, covered with bees. She wrote the date at the bottom, June 16th. 1882, and slipped the drawing inside the copy of Jane Eyre she had won for attendance at Sunday school.
That summer she was tall enough to help with the shearing, guiding the sheep to the shearers, carrying the fleeces to the byre. For days afterwards, she found tufts of wool in her clothes and hair. School ended and the woman came out of the weather house every morning for a week. When Hugh finished the milking, they walked up to the lochan and, while Alice flitted among the birch trees, he taught her to swim. By the time the weather broke, she could breaststroke to the willows on the far side.
—
Maybe it was because of Hugh that she remembered everything about that year. They lost half a field of oats at harvest time and the snow came early. When it reached the top of her boots, she didn’t have to go to school. In the long evenings, while her grandmother mended shirts and socks, she, Hugh, and her grandfather took turns reading The Princess and the Goblin.Lizzie imagined herself as the young princess, brave and truthful, and Hugh as Curdie, the miner’s son, who defeats the goblins. Her grandmother was the princess’s mysterious great-great-grandmother, tall and strong, with shining hair. And her grandfather was the king, on his white horse.
At Christmas Hugh said, if it was all right, he wouldn’t go home. They ate one of the ducks, she tried not to think which one, and played Happy Families and whist. At Hogmanay, she and her grandmother cleaned the house from top to bottom, sweeping out the old year to make room for the new. She was allowed to stay up. When the grandfather clock struck midnight, the four of them held hands and sang “Auld Lang Syne.” On Twelfth Night a blizzard orphaned two early lambs. She named them the White Queen and the Red Queen.
She was on her way to fetch their milk one wintry evening when she saw light spilling out of the byre. As an adult, she would try to draw the scene: her grandfather, holding a knife, bent over a sawhorse from which hung a small white body. Every spring he skinned the dead lambs and tied the skins onto the living orphans so they would be adopted. Stepping into the lantern light, she asked which lamb would get the skin.
“The White Queen,” Rab said. “She’s smaller.”
“But the coat will be too big.” Blood dripped onto the straw.
He said that didn’t matter; ewes recognised their lambs by smell, not sight. In the kitchen she held the White Queen while he tied on the skin. It gaped around her shoulders, engulfed her tail, but in the morning, the ewe let her nurse.
On Burns Night she came home from school to find the haggis already made. She hurried through her chores and set the table. Neil and Dr. Murray and his wife came to supper. Hugh gave the “Address to a Haggis,” and her grandfather recited “Tam o’ Shanter.” As he said the lines
O Tam! Hadst thou but been sae wise
As taen thy ain wife Kate’s advice!
She tauld thee weel thou was a skellum,
A blethering, blustering, drunken bellum,
he eyed her grandmother in a way that made them all laugh. Then his voice grew serious as he recounted Tam’s drunken ride, the witches and warlocks in fierce pursuit. Years later, when Lizzie found herself living at the Tam o’ Shanter pub, she would think her grandfather had, unwittingly, led her there.
—
That spring Hugh suggested she take Alice down to the meadow by the river. A flock of jackdaws was nesting in the pine trees; perhaps she might find a mate. Three Saturdays in a row Lizzie sat reading while Alice flew from tree to tree, playing in the wind. Sometimes she brought Lizzie a pine cone or a twig, but even when the wind took her near their nests she ignored the other birds. “Och, she’s decided we’re her family,” Hugh said.
At school she overheard the girls talking about the hiring fair in Ceres; there would be music, peep shows, confectionery stands, races. After consulting Hugh, she cleaned the henhouse without being reminded and at supper asked could they please, please go to the fair. ...
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