In Salter’s Grange the winter of 1885 was damp and dreary, but there was little cold and almost no frost right up to Christmas. The falls of snow in January melted quickly as the weather turned wild and stormy. By the end of the month the mild dampness that had characterised the late autumn had returned. Then, suddenly and silently, on the very last night of March, to the enormous delight of the children, snow fell again. Waking to sunshine and blue skies, they could hardly wait to get outside.

Rose laughed as she watched them set off for school, Hannah absorbed in making footprints wherever she found pieces of undisturbed snow, James and Sam gathering it up in handfuls, circling around, watching for the best moment to pelt each other.

As she set about her morning tasks, Rose gave thanks for the quiet, uneventful months that had passed. Today was the first of April. Whatever hard weather early spring might bring, nevertheless it was spring.

‘Winter is over and all’s well,’ she said aloud as she made up the fire, and began her preparations for baking a cake of wheaten bread and some soda farls. ‘At least it’s well for us,’ she added, more soberly.

In the world beyond Salter’s Grange all was far from well. The newspapers were full of turbulence and unrest they’d hoped the new Land Act would have put an end to, but it hadn’t. Throughout Ulster, the situation was getting worse, if anything, as rumours about a Home Rule Bill were confirmed. There had been incidents and outrages, protest meetings, demonstrations and counter demonstrations. Happily, none of these events had touched them directly, but the uncertainties of the times were an ever present threat.

They’d come through the winter months without hurt. There’d been no unexpected expenses when least money was coming in. There’d been no illness in the family beyond the normal winter coughs and colds. However wearying life when dim, misty days darkened to night so early in the afternoon and mornings were bleak and cold, they’d suffered no real hardship.

She had no quarrel with the day’s routine, for many small pleasures could be set against it. Except for little Sarah, all of the children were now reading and writing for themselves and even Sarah could manage her ABC and her numbers, though still too young for school. She spent much of her day ‘reading’ to Ganny, from whatever book she took from the shelf and when her brothers and sister arrived from school she’d insist they read to her.

Hannah loved reading aloud and was always willing, but James, who preferred railway engines to fairy stories, and even Sam, who was still on the first reading book, would take their turn. There was something about Sarah’s directness and quiet determination that intrigued Rose. But what she particularly enjoyed was Sarah’s sudden sharp delight in what she heard or saw. The laughter her pleasure provoked was a constant delight to her.

She fetched her baking board from the wash house, shivering as she came back into the warm kitchen. The board was so cold it felt as if it was damp. She set it a little way back from the hearth to get the chill off and picked up her sewing while she waited.

She’d had to work hard at it over the last five months, more than doubling her best efforts of previous winters, for the lean winter weeks at the forge were leaner than usual. John had been right. Some of their best customers had left them, taking their work to Drumsill or Ballyleny. Either meant a few extra miles, but that was nothing to men who’d made up their minds John and Thomas did not deserve their business, because they were not ‘loyal.’

For such a mild man, Thomas’s determination not to be intimidated by their threats had surprised them. He’d let it be known he had neither Protestant nor Catholic neighbours, simply neighbours. So far, there’d been no further visits from the Orangemen, but the drilling continued and they knew some of their neighbours had joined the ranks. It was not said openly in the forge, but it was well known many younger men allowed themselves to be roped in more to avoid bad feeling in their homes than from any commitment to the cause.

Rose finished her seam, put the sewing back in its clean cloth and took up her baking board.

‘That’s better,’ she said, touching its surface, before she sprinkled it with flour.

Having been prepared for difficult times, things had turned out much better than she’d expected. Her very hard work of the summer months had made the house workable. Whitewashed for the third time, the wash house had finally lost its smell. John had made a deep shelf all the way round its walls and a wooden plinth, so that the sack of flour wouldn’t take up dampness from the earth floor. She could now keep both milk and butter against the north facing wall, cool even in summer, and there was space underneath for the water pails, the sack of potatoes, the crock of oats. She’d made a rag rug to spare the cold feet of the children when they washed themselves in the space nearest to the back door.

The handsome new crane with its chain and hooks, installed before Christmas and much admired by all who visited, meant she no longer had to bend over the fire to cook on the hearth itself. The backache that had plagued her during the summer disappeared completely and some of the anxiety as to what would happen if she were ever to fall ill went with it.

As the morning passed and she alternated sewing with making the bread and tending it, she glanced through the window and saw the snow was melting. From the high pitched roof of the forge, small avalanches slithered down and fell wetly among the long bars of iron that leant against its low walls.

John and Thomas had made her life easier as well. Whenever either of them went into town to buy supplies for the forge, they offered to pay the rent. As her own grocer had begun a new weekly delivery round, she had only to go to Armagh when she needed to buy fabric or change the library books. It was a relief to know that she didn’t have to tramp wet or icy roads simply to fetch her groceries.

To her great surprise, she’d found she had a little more time for herself, even with all the extra hours she needed for her sewing, Some of it she spent reading to Sarah, but Sarah was often happy to play by herself. That was when she settled herself at the kitchen table and wrote letters to her mother, or Lady Anne, or Sam. For the first time too, she wrote to her sister Mary in Donegal, and brothers Michael in Scotland and Patrick in Nova Scotia.

Neither Mary nor her brothers had ever been correspondents, though they did write an occasional letter to their mother. They left it to Hannah to pass on their news to Rose, rather than write to her themselves. Now in these winter months, she was surprised and grateful to have letters in reply to hers. She enjoyed writing and found a strange comfort in setting down on paper all that had happened in the preceding months.

Her sister Mary had never left Donegal. After her father’s death, she’d gone into service with the Stewarts of Ards, married a shopkeeper in Creeslough and had seven children, the eldest boy and girl now working in the shop themselves, thus giving their father more time to see to the out workers who supplied his drapery business. Mary’s letters were mostly about her children, but in each of them she’d referred to their life together in Ardtur.

Do you ever remember Owen Friel? she’d written in one of them.

Rose remembered Owen perfectly well. He’d carried her when she could walk no further and he’d never told anyone where he’d found her or that she’d set off by herself to go up the mountain and look at the castle their landlord was supposed to be building.

Rose suddenly saw herself back in the schoolhouse trembling at the harsh sound of the Master’s voice. She could never forget Danny Lawn, after all he’d suffered at the hands of the Master.

Her older brother Michael had no children, but he and his wife had three nephews living with them since the death of his wife’s sister. Their small farm on the Galloway coast was enough to keep them fed and clothed, but Michael was looking forward to the eldest boy being apprenticed to a boat builder near Port William.

It’s always good to have some money coming in that doesn’t depend on the weather and the price of cattle, he’d said, in a letter that gave her an unexpectedly sharp picture of his family and the rich hilly landscape that backed the sweeping curves and sandy beaches of the Solway coast.

Rose gathered her thoughts, swung the crane away from the fire and held her hand an inch or two above the griddle. It was hot, but not too hot. She sprinkled it sparingly with flour, took the circle of wheaten bread from the baking board, lowered it gently on to the dark surface of the griddle, marked it into four sections with a sharp knife and swung it back over the fire. Dusting the flour from her hands, she took up her sewing again till the wheaten cooked and the griddle had reheated for the soda.

Her eldest brother, Patrick, three years older than herself, really surprised her by telling her he often made the bread for the family when he was at home. He’d married a girl whose family, the Rosses, had emigrated from Skye to Nova Scotia with the Earl of Selkirk in 1801. He had nine children, five boys and four girls. They farmed a portion of land that had come down to his wife from the original division made after their ship arrived. Most of the time, it was his wife and family who ran the farm while Patrick travelled back and forth, earning a very good living as a trader, just as his uncle had done before him.

‘Kerry, Dublin, Donegal, Salter’s Grange, Galloway and Nova Scotia,’ she said to herself, as she drew the threads to shire the front of the small dress. She thought of the children who had once recited ‘Ulster, Munster, Leinster, Connaught,’ in the brand new school house so close to Ardtur, scattered now far beyond the four provinces of Ireland, and of Danny Lawn, who couldn’t recite the counties of Ulster, buried in some unmarked grave outside a prison compound for his part in an attempted murder.

The wheaten had risen nicely, opening along the cuts she’d made. She took a clean cloth and transferred it to cool on a harning stand John’s father had made for Sarah sometime after the bent candlestick. She swept the griddle with a goose’s wing, dusted it with fresh flour and set the soda farls to bake. She wiped her fingers on her apron and took up her sewing again.

The best news of the whole winter had come from Lady Anne just before Christmas. Initially, she’d had a very difficult time. She’d sold most of the jewellery she’d inherited from her grandmother to keep the estate going, then visited the members of the Ladies Land League who were active in the area. She wasn’t sure she’d had much effect on them, but shortly afterwards rents were paid once more, though somewhat reduced. A month later, she’d written to say that Harrington had made a complete recovery, was able to ride again, and although he knew exactly who was responsible for his near miss, he’d decided not to proceed against them.

Rose smiled to herself. Lady Anne’s next letter had so delighted her she almost knew it by heart.

She and John had read the letter over and over, Rose beaming with delight at the thought of Lady Anne setting up her targets and practising with her new pistols.

‘Aye, she’d not let her man down, the same one. No wonder the pair of ye got on so well in the end.’

‘I wonder, John,’ she said, as she put Lady Anne’s letter in the window, ‘if Sam was able to do anything. He did say he’d try.’

The day after she’d bumped into Lady Ishbel and heard the news from Sligo, she’d sat down and written to Sam.

She’d read her letter through when she’d finished and decided she was being a bit hard on Sam, but she didn’t change a word of it. He’d always been honest with her and she knew he’d always acted for the best, but deciding what the best was, was another matter. Sometimes she just didn’t know what to think herself. However important it was to have general principles, there must always be exceptions, surely. You couldn’t label people ‘bad’ because they were Protestant landlords, or ‘good’ because they were poor Catholics. It was never as easy as that.

Sam had written by return. He’d explained the way the League was organised, decisions were made locally. Someone in Sligo would have listed Harrington as a big landowner. Possibly as an absentee if he didn’t know about the split nature of his estates. Harrington might even have been listed by someone who had a grudge against him.

Rose always passed her letters to John. Those from Hannah and Lady Anne, he could sit back and enjoy, but he’d take up a letter from Sam with every sign of trepidation and read it with fierce concentration. When he’d finished, he’d shuffle the pages, and ask a question, not quite unrelated to what he’d just read.

More than once, Rose had questioned him closely. Did he think Sam was right? What did he think the Orangemen would do if a Home Rule Bill was passed? But John would shake his head and refuse to engage with it.

‘Some things I can grasp just fine. I see what’s fair and what’s not fair. But the more ye go inta things the more difficult it is. I wish I could live in a world with no politics, an’ no religion. No people taking sides, arguin’ and fightin’ about the rights and wrongs of things. Sure what’s the point? Why spoil the time we have when we’re on this earth so short a while?’

Rose had every sympathy with his agitation and distress but she wasn’t sure it made sense to try and shut the door on what was happening when it was so near at hand. Like Mary-Anne Scott, sooner or later the threat out there in the world would come knocking and you had to be ready to cope with whatever it threw at you.

By noon, the thaw had advanced so far that only where the forge itself and the pear tree on the path to Thomas’s house cast a deep enough shadow were small patches of snow able to survive, lying like flour spilt from a sack. From the mended thatch of their own cottage, a row of drips splashed down on the layer of gravel John had laid in a shallow trench across the front of the house the previous autumn. The whitewashed walls gleamed wetly in the bright light.

She stood at the open door, took a deep breath of the mild air and peered down into her flowerbeds, now carefully enclosed by fine netting wire to protect them from the depredations of Mary-Anne’s hens.

‘My goodness, I wasn’t expecting you so soon,’ she said aloud, as she recognised vigorous grey-green shoots of aquilegia pushing upwards out of the dark earth and unfurling their first new leaves. ‘Mary-Anne didn’t get you after all,’ she added in a whisper, with a cautious look towards the closed door of her neighbour’s house.

The house always looked so dead, even when the smoke of a new fire rose each morning. Mary-Anne often kept her door shut, even in good weather, and she wondered what she did all day, apart from read her Bible and the sermons that the Methodists circulated.

She blinked up at the sun, grateful to feel its warmth on her face. In a moment, she would step back into the kitchen to put the kettle down for making tea and butter bread for John who’d be over soon for a quick bite. But not just for a few more minutes. She smiled to herself. Mary-Anne hadn’t yet accused her of being idle, standing at her front door looking round her as if she had no work to do, but that might well come.

Nothing would surprise her, after the criticisms of the last months. Allowing her children to sit in the seats of the reaping machines awaiting repair, or to cluster round the stone circle when a turf fire burnt all the way round an iron rim before it was shrunk onto a wheel. Her children shouldn’t be allowed to play outside on Sundays and certainly not to laugh. Nor should she let them talk to the two serving girls from Robinson’s, who took it in turns to deliver the milk each day.

Sometimes she would actually respond to her hostile comments, even though she knew well enough neither quick retort or logical argument would have the slightest effect. More often, she would merely smile, hear her out and quietly shut the door. She never ceased to be surprised, however, at Mary-Anne’s cunning. She always timed her visits when both hammers were going at full tilt so Thomas remained ignorant of her sorties, for she and John had long since agreed he was not to be told.

‘Sure the poor man has enough to put up with,’ he said, when she told him of the latest visitation. ‘Can ye imagine getting’ inta bed with yer wuman,’ he went on, as they got into bed themselves, and he put out his arm to hold her close. ‘Ah can’t understan’ meself how they come to have three childer.’

She smiled to herself. John’s way of coping with Mary-Anne was to make fun of her behind closed doors, but they both knew Mary-Anne was no joke. Often enough she caught sight of Annie, the eldest girl, carrying out the slop bucket to empty in the privy. A poor, sad looking child with drooping shoulders, tall for her eleven years, but with no spring in her step.

The worst tirade in the winter months had followed a visit from Bridget, who had brought their weekly butter over one pleasant morning after the churning. Bridget and her sister Maggie came from a part of Donegal unknown to her, an Irish-speaking area around Dunlewy. Neither girl had much English and were delighted when they discovered Rose had Irish. Whenever they came over they would question her about words new to them.

‘What is dishabels, Rose?’ Missus said to Old Missus Robinson that she was ‘caught in her dishabels’. We didn’t like to ask.

‘Dishabels’ is old clothes, Bridget. What you wear to do the dirty jobs in the morning, before you dress yourself properly for the day,’ she explained in Irish.

They’d stood laughing and talking by the door for five minutes or so, but hardly was Bridget out of sight before Mary-Anne was knocking fiercely at the open door, though Rose was plain to be seen inside.

‘Mrs Hamilton, I’ll thank you not to stand out in the street talking in a foreign language,’ she began as she raised her head at the intrusion. ‘It’s bad enough that our neighbours employ these chits of girls that can’t even speak the Queen’s English without you encouraging them,’ she went on, as Rose crossed to the door. ‘I think you ought to be ashamed of yourself, talking the language of servants, now you’ve come up a bit in the world. I won’t have my children hearing it,’ she said, with her usual tone of complete finality, as she turned on her heel and stalked off.

She’d been tempted to curse her roundly in Irish as she departed, but she’d restrained herself for the hammers had stopped momentarily and Thomas had stepped out to fetch another bar of iron. She’d slipped back into the house before he caught her eye and taken out her frustration by pounding the sheets.

The last thin icing of melting snow slid down the roof of the forge and landed squarely in front of the open door just where the regular passage of feet had made a shallow depression in front of the threshold. On wet days, John and Thomas had to sweep it dry with a stiff broom, but today the drying wind had mopped up the moisture from each succeeding fall. Even as she watched, the tangled tufts of grass between bits of machinery straightened up as they shed their moisture. A few days of this and the trees might begin to leaf. Then she could really believe spring had come.

Just as she was about to go back indoors, she saw a carrier’s cart come up the slope of the hill from the direction of Armagh. To her surprise, the heavy vehicle drew to a halt somewhere beyond the end of the lane. She looked down towards the road, but the cart had stopped out of sight, hidden behind the great ivy covered elm that stood a little way beyond their own gable. She turned away, but the voices she heard drew her back to the door.

She stood listening unashamedly as the conversation floated up to her, borne on the still air. Two men were speaking Irish with a familiar ring that took her straight back to the stable yard at Currane Lodge. The older, rougher voice, perhaps one of the carters that delivered for Turners or Hillocks of Armagh, was bidding good day and good luck to a younger voice who responded warmly, thanking him for the lift and for his conversation.

Moments later, the young man himself appeared outside the forge, his back to her, as he looked through the door into the dark. The shoulders were broader, the red hair less unruly, but there could be no doubt about it. It was Sam. The hammers fell silent and her young brother, now a grown man, stood talking to John and Thomas.

Every part of her wanted to run across and throw her arms round him, but she was so surprised to see him she just leant against the doorpost and stood staring at him.

He turned away, caught sight of her at once and came striding across.

‘Rose, Rose, it’s wonderful to see you.’

He held her so tightly and kissed her cheeks so gently that she knew something was wrong.

‘What is it, Sam, what is it?’ she said, as he released her. ‘Are you in any kind of trouble? Tell me. Tell me quickly.’

‘I’m fine, Rose,’ he said, shaking his head sadly. ‘It’s Ma.’

‘Is she ill?’ she asked, a terrible feeling of dread passing over her.

‘She died last week, Rose. I hadn’t the heart to write you a letter, so I came as soon as I could.’