In a way, she felt as she had felt when her father went away and left her. Fright, anger and helplessness, the sense of being nobody who could make things happen. But then she had been only ten. Four years of schooling her face to be expressionless, her thoughts to be her private property, had not gone to waste.
After her first despair, she thought, ‘I won’t let them beat me. If that dress is hidden around the house I’ll find it. Or I’ll bribe Beatie, or coax Judah, into telling me where it is.’
She had learnt a lot about herself in this new rough world. Her own thoughts and conclusions of just a month before filled her with embarrassed astonishment when she reviewed them.
‘What a dummo I was! I knew as much about real life as poor little Natty.’
She stopped being silent and distraught and asked Granny if she could help in the house and the shop until whatever it was that she was fated to do as the Stranger was revealed.
Granny put her arms about her. Orkney folk were an undemonstrative people, as she had realised, and Granny’s action touched her. ‘My heart aches for you, Abby, but ’twill be worth it, for you as well as the rest of us. It is my duty to see the Gift handed on. I can do no other.’
Abigail nodded gravely. Granny’s eyes twinkled. ‘And if you are planning on finding your gown, hen, it’s nae guid. It’s where you’ll n’er look for it.’
‘Oh, damn you all!’ Abigail was furious.
‘Fair enough,’ said Granny, her eyes still twinkling.
Still, rather than maunder around with nothing to do, Abigail fitted herself into the household routine. She learnt to rake out the shop fire and carry the ash in pails to the ash-pit in the yard. Some of this ash was saved and sifted and used to make soap. Though many of the inhabitants of The Rocks washed themselves, during their rare personal ablutions, with the harsh lye soap, the Talliskers and Bows used it for laundry soap and never applied it to their skins.
‘You’d be as chapped as a frost-bitten potato in a week, lass,’ explained Granny. They all, even the men, used oatmeal in muslin bags with which to scrub themselves, and as the days went by Abigail noticed her own brown skin taking on the fineness that was characteristic of all the family’s complexions.
She scrubbed and dusted, washed and polished the lamp chimneys, and learnt how to set a wick so that the paraffin (which she called kerosene) burnt clear and without odour.
She did approach Beatie about the dress, but the girl said downrightly she had no idea where it was, and would not tell if she did.
‘But Beatie, if I could escape to my own time, maybe you could come with me, and go to school, and learn all you want, with no one to discourage you.’
A look of intense yearning passed over the younger girl’s face.
‘I’d sell my ten toes for it, as ye weel know,’ she said, ‘but how could I leave Dovey? For she’s all in all to me now my mother’s gone. Aye, I’d do without anything in life rather than leave Dovey.’
Abigail best liked working in the shop. Very quiet and mild since his last frenzy, Mr Bow was a pleasant companion, though given to bursts of tears, turning away unexpectedly and wiping his eyes on the corner of his apron.
‘I’m as right-minded as any man when I don’t touch the spirits,’ he explained. ‘But the pain in my head gets that bad, and hain’t it a temptation then to have a halfer and relieve it a little? But I didn’t hurt you bad, wench, eh, did I?’
‘Only a little, Mr Bow,’ Abigail assured him. She said frankly, ‘I expect you know that Mrs Tallisker thinks I’m the mysterious Stranger?’
‘Don’t I just,’ he replied, ‘and it must be a heart scald for you, kept here amongst folk not your own. But I ain’t saying nothing about it, Miss, because I’m skeered to do so, if you must know the truth of it. For ’tis true, you know, the Gift and that.’
‘But, Mr Bow,’ protested Abigail, ‘you’re English. You can’t believe this Orkney fairy-tale.’
He looked at her sadly. ‘I do, dear Miss, and that’s a fact. Didn’t my pretty ’Melia, when I was a-courting her, tell me that she’d die afore me and leave me with enough sorrow to break my back? I laughed me head off, for you know I was near twenty years older than ’Melia, and in the course of nature it was to be expected that I would be taken afore her. But I said two years of your company, my pretty dear, is worth a lifetime of tears. And I did better than that. Nigh nineteen years we was wed, and never a frown.’
Here he turned away quickly.
‘Did you ever see Florence Nightingale?’ interposed Abigail hurriedly.
He wiped his eyes, turned once more to his patient pulling and slapping of the rapidly congealing toffee over the great hook. ‘Nay,’ he said ‘not to remember like. I mind only filth and the stink of wounds and green water. And then the ship and England. And after a long time I rejoined my regiment and, unfit for active duty as I was, we was posted to New South Wales to the garrison. And there I served out my term, four years agone now. And what I’d do without Granny and Dovey I can’t bear to think, for there’s Beatrice needs a mother, and Gibbie a-fading away, and myself that mazy sometimes I dunno if I’m on head or heels.’
Abigail realised dolefully that Mr Bow would never cross Granny in order to help her.
But this did not mean that she did not stealthily investigate every available place where her dress might have been hidden. In such a tiny cottage she was rarely alone, and she was abashed and angry when caught scrabbling behind the sacks of sugar in the cellar under the shop.
‘It inna worthy of you, pet,’ said Granny quietly. Abigail was crimson.
‘It’s all your fault,’ she retorted. ‘You took my dress and hid it. I’ve never before snooped amongst other people’s things in my life!’
‘And you’ll not have to again,’ said Mrs Tallisker, mildly, ‘for I’ll tell ye where the gown is laid away. In Dovey’s bride chest, which is locked.’
Abigail groaned. ‘You know very well I’d never as much as lift the lid of Dovey’s bride chest, let alone break the lock. You’re as crafty as a fox; you ought to be ashamed!’
‘Aye,’ agreed Granny tranquilly, ‘but ’tis all in a good cause.’
‘I just want to go home, you know,’ whispered Abigail.
‘You’re as restless as a robin, child,’ said Mrs Tallisker. ‘But ’twill not be long now.’
There was a great difference in Mrs Tallisker. She had, all at once, become older and smaller. Only a few weeks before she had towered, or so it seemed, over Abigail. Now Abigail was almost as tall. Her skin had crumpled more deeply, more extensively, like a slowly withering flower. She could not work as hard as before, but sat more often in the parlour with Gibbie, knitting thick grey socks for Judah.
‘Aye,’ she said with her sweet smile, as Abigail secretly stared at her, ‘’tis a fearful effort to give out the Power when it has decided to leave. If I could do what I did for you, child, you can give me a little of your time, inna that fair enough?’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Abigail, but in her heart she was grudging.
Sometimes she sat, pondering, in front of Dovey’s bride chest. It was a small, green-painted tin box with an arched lid decorated with faded tulips and rosettes. In there was her key to home, but her sense of honour prevented her from taking a knife and forcing the lid.
‘It’s ridiculous,’ she thought, ‘but it’s true. I can’t touch it. Oh, that Granny! She knows me better than I do myself.’
She had no curiosity about the contents of Dovey’s bride chest, knowing that from the age of seven every Orkney girl began to prepare household linen against the day when her hand would be asked in marriage. She thought it would be full of towels and sheets and little muslin bags to hold oatmeal.
The Rocks was an uncomfortable place to be at that time of the year. As often in Sydney, it was a time of spectacular electrical storms and erratic summer rain. Wild winds snored and spiralled off the Pacific archipelagoes, their fringes sweeping the Australian coast like the edges of cloudy shawls. Judah’s ship, The Brothers, had been driven onto the mud at Walsh Bay, and needed repairs. Though he was working on her all day, he was permitted to spend the nights at home, and so she saw far more of him than hitherto.
Now that she was familiar with the household routine, Abigail saw that it turned upon Judah’s comings and goings as if he were a pivot. He blew into the house like a bracing nor’ easterly, and everyone, from the mourning father to Gibbie languishing before the fire in the suffocatingly hot parlour, seemed to absorb vitality from him. He was unlike any boy Abigail had known in her own world. He was just a well-knit, sturdy person of middle height, yet his muscles were of oak, his mind far-reaching and vigorous.
At first Abigail observed him with friendly curiosity. The difference between him and boys of eighteen in her time was that Judah was a man. She thought of the likeable, aimless brothers of many of her friends, without discipline or ambition, and wondered uneasily how it had come to be that they were so different from this son of a poor family, who had done a man’s job, and thought it a right rather than a burden, from his fourteenth year.
He was artless and straightforward, with not the slightest interest in the world from which Abigail had so strangely come.
At first she thought he did not believe her when she told him of ships driven by atomic fission – some under the water – and told him that even ferries no longer used steam, but were oil powered.
‘Oh, aye,’ he said, unconcerned. ‘I believe you. Hanna I seen the Gift at work so often since I was in arms? My mother knew the very day I would return to dock, fair weather or foul, and would have a plum duff in the pot, for as a lad I was fair crazy for a slice of Spotted Dick. But what you tell me, Abby love, well, ’tis like all the fingle-fangles the Government men prate about – Henry Parkes and all that lot – Federation and free trade, and republicanism. I know ’tis true, but it hanna importance for me. ’Tis here I live, do you see, in 1873, and my labour is here, and my own folk, and I’m thankful to God for both. So that’s enough for me.’
‘But men landing on the moon!’ cried Abigail. ‘Don’t you think that’s fantastic?’
‘Damned foolishness, I call it,’ he said, and flushed. ‘Your pardon, Abby, for a word Granny would thicken my ear for, but ’tis no more and no less. What good to man or beast is that bare lump of rock?’
‘At least it makes the tides,’ snapped Abigail, ‘and where would you be without them?’
He laughed. ‘True for you, but no man has to go there to press a lever or turn a wheel for that!’
Having failed to interest him in the future, she turned to the past, and asked him was he ever homesick for Orkney, as she knew Dovey was.
‘Not I,’ he said. ‘Why, ’tis the past, and dead and gone. I’m a New South Welshman now, and glad about it, aye, gey glad!’ His eyes danced. ‘Ah, I’m glad to be alive, and at this minute, I tell ye! There’s few enough with my good fortune – for in a month or so I’ll be an AB, with a decent wage and prospects. Oh, aye,’ he added hastily, in case she felt slighted, ‘I’m sure the time you came from is a very grand place to be, but it’s no’ for me, not for all the tea in China.’
The cottage was always noisy when Judah was at home. Either he was doing a sailor’s jig with Beatie, twirling Granny in what she called a ‘poker’, playing tunes on a tin whistle, or giving Gibbie hair-raising pick-a-back rides up and down the twisted stairs. She began to listen for his laugh, his ‘Ahoy, who’s at home at Bows’?’ as he came in, for he had the soft full voice of Dovey and his grandmother, very pleasant to the ear. Other times she would find him, late at night, his bright fair head bent in the circle of light from the paraffin lamp as he corrected Beatie’s Latin exercises, or studied his books on navigation.
‘For I’ve a mind to have my own ship one day,’ he said cheerfully. ‘If Captain Cook could do it, so can I, and sail to the cannibal islands and bring back a cargo of sandalwood.’
‘And what will you do when you’re rich?’ asked Abby laughing.
He gave her his candid blue look. ‘I’ll take my faither to a fine surgeon and have his trouble fixed, so that he can be happy, and I’ll pay a clever tutor to give Beatie all the learning she wants, and I’ll buy Dovey a fine silk dress like a princess, and I might give you a white mouse for a pet.’
‘Nothing larger or finer?’ she asked teasingly.
‘Ah, so you’d like a rat? Then I’ll catch you one this very night. We have them by the thousand on board The Brothers, and the ship’s cats are all worn down as small as this with hard work.’
He showed her with finger and thumb.
‘Oh, Judah,’ she laughed, ‘you’re a clown. I’ll miss you when I go home.’
And all at once it hit her. It was like a physical blow, so that she lost her breath, and could scarcely gasp a ‘Good night’ before she fled for the stairs.
Dovey was already in bed and asleep. Abigail undressed hurriedly in the dark, flung herself into bed and buried her face in the feather pillow. It was not possible. Love could not pierce one with a dart, envelop one with an unquenchable fire, all those things that old songs said, that the girls at school said. ‘I saw him getting off the bus and my knees went. I didn’t know what I was doing. I went down the wrong street and left my school-case at the bus stop.’ Or, ‘I just sort of burnt all over; it was unreal. I couldn’t have answered if he’d spoken to me, I was paralytic.’
Mum, talking about meeting Dad. ‘We were both swimming. He was thrashing along and ran into me. Boom! Knocked all the wind out of me. He hauled me out of the water like a wet sack. None of your romantic picking me up and carrying me out. And I lay on the sand whooping. Oh, it was squalid, I can tell you. He said “Why weren’t you watching where I was going, you knucklehead?” Typical. My fault, mind you. His hair was all plastered down, like yellow seaweed, yuk! I just lay there making noises like an up-chucking cat and looking at his blue, blue eyes, and thinking, “I’ve met him at last, my own man. Wonder what his name is?” ’
My own man! When her mother had said that, so spontaneously and gaily, Abigail had been so embarrassed she marvelled that she had not come out in hives all over. The idea of one’s mother coming out with a golden oldie phrase!
But now she saw it was the only phrase there was.
She could scarcely admit it to herself. The most exquisitely delicate sensation touched her, body and mind. The empty place in her heart opened like a flower and was filled.
‘I love him,’ she thought. ‘I love Judah. I’ve loved him all along, ever since he carried me to the window that first night. And I didn’t know.’
She lay awake for hours, in a daze of happiness.
It was like going to another country, seeing landscapes that were not of this world. Yet she had known those landscapes were there: that was why she had always felt empty, incomplete, because she knew they were there and she belonged in them, but she did not know where to look to find them.
The dark room seemed full of diamonds and spangles, as though the light within her was so exuberant it streamed from her eyes and fingers and toes.
The ships moored at the wharves creaked and groaned, hasty footsteps sounded on the cobbles of a nearby lane. In the Chinamen’s laundry the mangle thumped. These sounds were drowned by the bim-bam of thunder, and the dark was suddenly wiped over by lightning. She heard Gibbie shriek above, and Dovey instantly stir.
‘I’m awake, Dovey,’ she said. ‘I’ll go up to him.’
‘Take the cannle, pet,’ said Dovey drowsily and thankfully, ‘and my red gown.’
Abby stumbled up the stairs. The baggy red-flannel dressing-gown smelt of perspiration and the vinegar Dovey had used to sponge the collar and cuffs. Normally Abby would have been sickened by it. But now she was different. These small things did not seem to matter any more.
‘I dunna want you,’ snivelled Gibbie, sitting up in bed like a pale owl, his hair a meagre fuzz. ‘I want my Dovey.’
‘Dovey’s so tired,’ said Abigail. ‘You’ll be a good lad and let her have her sleep, won’t you?’
‘I’m that skeered of lightning,’ he sobbed. ‘’Twill come and get me and grill me like a kipper!’
‘It won’t if I’m here,’ said Abigail confidently. She sat beside him. He smelled sickly and looked like a little death’s-head in the candlelight. And Abigail found herself thinking, ‘It’s a good thing, though. Now Dovey and Judah are safe.’
For an instant she remembered her mother’s dark dewdrop eyes, as she said, ‘You don’t know how powerful love can be’, and she thought how strange it was that love had made her both callous and tender. She did not care if this child died. Though she had never liked him, she had not wanted to deprive him of his life. But now, if his death meant that Judah lived, then she did not care a jot if he died.
At the same time she did what would have made her skin creep a day or so before: she put her arms around his shivering, bony little body and held him comfortingly.
She thought, ‘I think I could even do the same for foul Vincent, the way I feel now.’
‘Want to do Number One,’ said Gibbie. She brought him the chamber-pot; put it away on the wash-stand again.
‘Lie down now and go to sleep. I’ll keep the lightning from hurting you,’ she said.
‘Are you a witch?’ asked Gibbie, big-eyed. ‘Beatie said you wunna.’
Abigail considered. ‘No, I’m not. But I’m very good with thunder and lightning. Shall I tell you some more about Long John Silver and the other pirates?’
But the little boy was asleep in a few moments. The storm had boiled out to sea; she saw its last rip of light across the dark clouds on the horizon. The rain-glass was falling, Judah had said that evening. Would rain keep his ship from sailing? She wished that a hurricane would blow and keep him at home for a week. She stood for a while outside the room where Judah and his father slept. She did not wish to be with him; it was enough to know that he was there.
The rain was very heavy. It crashed down the slopes of Flagstaff Hill and some feared that the new Observatory itself would come sliding down and perch itself like Noah’s Ark on the edge of the cliff. It poured off the High Rocks in torrents and drenched the rat-ridden houses that overhung the alleys. The alleys themselves ran like storm channels. Then the sun would blaze out for a day or two; the air would be full of steams and stinks; people would get out with brooms made of twigs or thick splinters bound in a bush, and sweep away the muck.
Another time Abigail would have been outraged that a city already large and prosperous could tolerate such wretchedness on its front step. But now all the rain meant was that Judah was often at home. She spoke to him little. She helped Dovey wash his wet clothes that reeked of tar and seaweed, turning them constantly as they dried before the kitchen fire.
‘’Twas at a time like this that Aunt ’Melia and the others took the fever,’ said Dovey. ‘For the water gets tainted, and even the gentility die.’
But death seemed a long way from Abigail. Her days seemed filled with richness. She did not ask questions of herself, why she felt this enchanted calm, why she no longer fretted about her mother, her home in that other place. She scarcely thought. She just felt, and lived from day to day.
The coming of love was one thing. Yes, it had hit her like a thunderbolt, as other girls and her own mother had described. But what she felt of love itself seemed different from what she had heard and read. She did not long to touch him or be touched by him. Perhaps, she thought, that comes later.
Now, her whole body and mind and emotions had become exquisitely sensitive and delicate. The simple fact of his physical reality was enough to make her world different. To listen to him, to look at him, occasionally to brush past in the narrow passageways of the cottage, this was enough. More would be unbearable. She looked with intense and uncomplicated joy at the golden glint along his jawbone, his close-set ears, the capable width between thumb and forefinger. These seemed marvellous to her.
She was content with loving. She had not thought about being loved in return, though she believed that surely it must be a law of nature that sooner or later he would look up and see her as she saw him, the only one, the precious one.
There seemed no reason to talk to the others, so she did not speak, unless it was necessary. Perhaps they would believe she was just sulking about being kept a virtual prisoner.
Dovey’s shattered thigh pained severely in the wet weather. Granny had taken her into her own room, to rub the girl’s leg when the pain was worst.
‘For I still have a little of the healing touch,’ she explained.
Beatie had gone back to her own bed. She was supposed to help Abigail attend to Gibbie, if he needed someone in the night; but the little girl slept like one dead. So the days went past, and on many nights Abby climbed the attic stairs to the sick child and tried to be kind and tolerant with him. She could not help feeling that his insatiable desire for sympathy and attention was not related to his illness, but to his loss of his mother and his constant brooding on death. And how was she to explain these things to people who had never heard of psychology?
She and Beatie had been down to the market to buy vegetables and meat. It was a fine day; the people were out in crowds. She had enjoyed the outing, seeing the old-clo’ shops with the wheeled racks of tattered garments outside, the cobbler with a tall Wellington boot hung as a sign above his door, the itinerant cooks with their charcoal braziers – cooking and selling sausages, scallops, baked potatoes, haddocks, chitterlings – positioned every few yards along Argyle and Windmill streets.
Then, almost out of a blue sky, down had come another summer downpour. The girls had run like hares, but they were soaked, both having dragged off their shawls to cover the goods in case of damage.
They were in their bedroom, changing their clothes, when Beatie all at once said, ‘I have to talk to you, Abigail.’
‘Talk away,’ said Abigail cheerfully. She had been aware that Beatie had been more difficult during the last few days, flying into tantrums, bitter about school, churlish even with Dovey.
Judah had threatened to flatten her ears for her, though he had said it with his usual sunny smile.
‘What you need, my lass, is an outing. I’ll tell ye, I hae the very thing, and we’ll take Dovey and Gibbie too, if the lad’s fit enough. We’ll go cockling next Sabbath … I’ll get a lend of a dory, and we’ll go maybe right across to Billy Blue’s Point!’
But Granny was downright about Gibbie’s unfitness to go into the open air, and the sea wind at that, and Dovey murmured that she’d never get down Jacob’s Ladder at Walsh Bay with her leg as stiff as it was.
‘But ’tis a grand idea, Judah, and Abby will enjoy it, isn’t that true, hen? And Beatie will be clean out of her mind, she loves an outing so.’
But now, in the bedroom, Beatie said gruffly, ‘You! You’re stuck on him, inna that right?’
Abigail had been humming happily. Now she felt as though her blood flowed backwards, so fearful was the sense of privacy breached, of dignity defiled. She stammered, ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Dinna try to hide it from me,’ said Beatie. ‘I seen it in your face. Look at you now, red as a radish. You’re stuck on him, my brother Judah.’
‘You mind your own business!’ cried Abigail.
‘Blind me if it inna my business!’ retorted Beatie.
Abigail pulled her shift over her head. In its depths she managed to compose her face, force her outrage to subside.
She pulled down the shift and fastened the tapes of her drawers.
‘And suppose you’re right, what’s the matter with that? Not that I’m saying you’re right!’
‘Because Judah thinks you’re just a child, like me. That’s one thing. And the other thing is he’s promised.’
‘Promised,’ whispered Abigail. ‘What is promised?’
‘Are you daft? He’s betrothed to Dovey. He’s always been promised to her.’
It was as if the light had diminished. Abigail finished dressing, brushed her damp hair and tied it back. She did all these things automatically, her eyes fixed on Beatie’s face.
‘Stop girning at me!’ ordered Beatie testily. ‘What else did you expect? Dinna Judah lame her, when she was but a wean, flitter-brained scamp that he was? Not every man wants a lame wife, so he owes her something. But no matter about that. How could he help loving Dovey, beautiful and good as she is?’
‘In my time she wouldn’t be thought beautiful,’ said Abigail, and was immediately ashamed.
‘And in this one you’re no oil painting,’ snapped back Beatie, ‘and neither am I, come to that. But I’m telling you now – Judah belongs to Dovey, and they’ll marry as soon as he’s out of his time.’
‘But I’ve never seen him kiss her or anything,’ said Abigail half to herself. ‘How could anyone guess they are promised?’
‘Kissing! That’s no’ for Orkney folk,’ cried Beatie haughtily. ‘We keep our feelings to ourselves.’
‘Not you, I notice!’ flashed Abigail.
‘And anyway,’ continued Beatie, ‘such things are for after the betrothal, when Judah is out of his time, and is old enough to wed, and gives her a ring. She’s to have a garnet in a band of gold – real gold.’
‘Groovy,’ said Abigail numbly.
‘I dinna ken what that means,’ said Beatie gruffly, ‘but I can tell by your mug it’s no compliment. I’m telling you straight, I’ll not have you come between them. I’ll break your head first.’
‘Be quiet!’ said Abigail, in so cold a voice that Beatie faltered. Her fiery gaze dropped, and she muttered, ‘I hanna any right to speak like that. I ken no other way but to bluster, you see, Abby, because it’s the way of folks about here.’
Abigail was silent.
‘Nobody’s going to make Dovey unhappy,’ said Beatie sullenly. ‘Nobody. Not while I’m around. Granny’d let her lose Judah if it meant saving the Gift. The Gift comes first with Granny, but it dinna with me! And Dovey’s sae gentle – she’d never stand up for her rights, even if her heart broke.’
‘Has Dovey noticed too, then?’ asked Abigail. Beatie shook her head. ‘She hanna mentioned anything. Well, then,’ she said, with a return to her previous aggressive manner, ‘what will you do about it?’
‘This,’ said Abigail. She seized Beatie by the shoulders and shook her with such violence that when she let her go, the little girl fell on the floor.
She gaped at Abigail, not knowing whether to screech maledictions, or leap at the older girl like an infuriated monkey.
‘You’re a stirrer, that’s what you are,’ said Abigail. ‘Don’t you breathe a word of this to Dovey or I’ll break your head. You don’t know that what you said has a word of truth in it.’
‘Granny will know,’ said Beatie, half tearful, half triumphant.
‘Yes, and I’m going to see her, right now,’ said Abigail.