As April ended and the hours of daylight lengthened further, the evenings faded slowly after sun-filled days which brought the first real warmth of springtime. Sarah decided that these lovely evenings were her worst time of the day.
Morning and afternoon she was kept busy, whether it was bread to bake, potatoes to boil for the midday meal for Ben and Scottie, washing and cleaning, or caring for the fire so it neither burnt up and wasted fuel, nor fell so low she could not be ready to cook, or boil a kettle for tea should someone call. Like a ladder up the day, she sometimes thought, she had no need at all to wonder what to do, she simply had to take the next step, and then the next.
There was, she admitted, a reassurance in the continuing things; the echo of hammer on anvil, of hooves on cobbles, the postman stopping to pass the time of day, a hasty visit from Mary-Anne bearing her order of eggs and milk, or Jamesy, Mary-Anne’s son, coming up the hill with the heavy can of buttermilk, a favourite, so John said, with all those who worked in forges. ‘A king compared with water,’ he’d commented, as he explained that it cleared the throat of smoke and ash dust better than water ever could.
She told herself it was not surprising she should miss John most in the few hours of the day when they were at leisure, but she couldn’t fail to remember the mild, gentle evenings in the last two summers when they’d walked the lanes towards Loughgall, or Kilmore, or Salter’s Grange. Often they’d greet old friends of John’s working in tiny front gardens where by June there would be bright flowers: dahlias and roses and tall spikes of lupin. Sometimes they’d catch the unmistakeable scent of tobacco and find round the next corner an old man leaning on a gate puffing clouds of blue smoke into the warm air. John, it seemed, knew everyone and all those they met had welcomed her with an enthusiasm she had never expected.
Now, in the first full week of May, the kitchen calendar unmarked by any event, she sat by the fire, a small continuing thing when so much else was gone. Of her lonely bed she tried not to think, for there, despite being weary from the day’s work, she often remained sleepless, her tears flowing unbidden, her mind refusing to be at peace.
Sometimes in the last days of April, but seldom predictably, Mary-Anne had appeared in the evening. Having recently taken her mother-in-law into their home, the old woman now being able to do little for herself, it had inevitably made extra work for Mary-Anne. She never knew when Billy, or one of her sons, would see her weariness and say, ‘D’ye want to take a wee run up an’ see Sarah an’ we’ll see to Granny?’
Billy himself was a kind man and thoughtful enough, but often he was so tired out by evening and so burdened by his own responsibilities he didn’t notice how worn Mary-Anne had become. Their farm, with its well-built house and good grazing, was small, enough to provide for all five of them, but only if all went well. Mary-Anne was quite open about the fact. It wasn’t just a matter of working hard, she’d explained, and goodness knows Billy and the boys did that, but bad weather, or the sudden injury or death of an animal was always a threat; a major disaster meaning a bill that could not now be paid.
Mary-Anne, like Sarah, was the one who tried to keep track of their income. She played her own part as well in adding to it: keeping chickens, selling her eggs and making butter. Sometimes she did have a gift from a woman she’d helped through labour or miscarriage, as she’d certainly had from Sarah, but as often as not the women she helped were less well-off than she was. She was too kind ever to ask for anything from them.
Her evening visits were a pleasure to them both; the bond of love they’d made during Sarah’s loss of both husband and child strengthened at each meeting by the honesty growing between them, each confessing to their burdens and anxieties, cheering and encouraging each other, offering help with a problem shared, exchanging small gifts of cake, or vegetables, or a piece of cloth to mend a garment.
It was Mary-Anne who offered to see that Sarah’s newspaper was collected each week when Billy or one of the boys went to town. She assured Sarah she was welcome to go into Armagh with them, but if she had no need to go, they could still collect her paper with their own and bring it up in the evening, or with the next delivery of milk, eggs or buttermilk.
Sitting one evening, her back aching, with no new piece of needlework started and ready to hand, she thought of Mary-Anne’s offer. Still folded and sitting unread in the deep-set window, the neglected newspapers mocked her. Already there was another one awaiting her. The affairs of the world went on and there would always be news, if only from the far-flung parts of the island, places whose names she’d learnt from the old atlas her grandmother used when teaching her pupils about ‘our island’ and the exact place within it where they lived.
She read both papers hastily, skimming over events in Newry and Monaghan, Nenagh and Leitrim: the births, deaths and marriages and the movement of regiments to and from Armagh Barracks. It was on the very last page of the more recent one she found a comment on the weather that alerted her to something she had completely forgotten. She read the item again more slowly: Since Thursday evening we have had some refreshing showers, which have tended greatly to improve the early-set potatoes. The healthy appearance of the crops in the neighbourhood promises an abundant harvest.
Well, that would be good news for Billy, who had been planting now for weeks. John himself had put in two rigs of potatoes in the ‘garden’ – the cultivated area of Daisy’s field next to the back of the house. That would have been three or four weeks ago. Now she thought of it, unlike Billy who grew for the market as well as for themselves, John planted three crops, the final one much later in the year. That one, late-harvested, was the one where the potatoes were clamped. That store saw them through the winter.
Without the newspaper she would not have thought of that. Now she would have to ask Ben or Scottie to show her how to dig in the seed potatoes. Preparing them to be set she knew about, for she had sat with John while they cut the potatoes together after he’d explained each piece for planting had to have one, and only one, good sprouting eye.
Perhaps she did need her newspaper after all.
So deep in thought was she about the planting of potatoes and when the next lot should go in that she didn’t hear the tentative knock at the kitchen door, though the door itself was still open.
‘Are you all right, missus?’
She looked up in surprise. It was Ben standing there wearing battered, but clean clothes, his hair sticking to his head. It looked as if he had just washed it. He was looking down at her anxiously.
‘Ben, come in. I didn’t hear your step I was so busy thinking,’ she said quickly, totally amazed by his unexpected appearance.
Unlike Scottie, who ate his evening meal and then hurried home across the fields to sleep at his granny’s house, Ben used the bed provided up in the loft, as required by the terms of his apprenticeship. What he did between closing up the forge and going to his night’s rest she had no idea.
‘I had something to ask you. If it’s convenient,’ he said studiously, as if the lines had been well-rehearsed.
She looked up at him and smiled. He seemed to have grown recently, or perhaps she had just become more aware of him: a solid presence, observing, listening, taking everything in but remaining silent except for the usual muffled ‘Thank you’, for meals or mugs of tea. The only time she’d ever seen him show any feelings was when he’d looked at the damage to the trap when Daisy arrived home without her master, her eyes bulging, her flank smeared with blood and her sides heaving with exertion.
‘Come and sit down, Ben. Would you drink a mug of tea? I was just going to make one,’ she added, knowing that if she said otherwise he would be too uneasy to accept.
‘That would be great,’ he said, as if some burden had been lifted. ‘Can I put down the kettle for you?’ he said quickly, as she got to her feet.
‘Thank you, Ben, I’ll see if there’s still a bite of cake in the tin.’
She took her time carrying mugs and plates to the table and carefully carved the remaining wedge of cake, sharing it between them. She tried to think what she knew about Ben and found it was painfully little. His parents were dead, like hers, and he obviously had some relative who had sponsored his apprenticeship. It was something she and John had never had reason to speak about. Ben, like Scottie, had an elderly grandmother, but he only went to stay with her on a Saturday night, coming back to his bed in the loft above the forge late on Sunday evening for an early start on Monday morning. She didn’t even know where his grandmother lived, though clearly, unlike Scottie’s granny in Greenan, it was not nearby.
Ben was, as John always said, ‘A dab hand with the bellows’. While she cut the cake, he had knelt down on the hearth and in no time at all she was able to wet the tea and set it to draw. She went out then into the little chilly outshot at the back of the kitchen. There, by the back door, well-scrubbed wooden shelves carried milk, eggs and butter. She filled a small jug and found on her return to her great surprise that Ben was vigorously stirring the teapot.
‘Sometimes in the forge the tea gets so strong you could stand on it,’ he said easily, as he poured it into the two mugs she’d left ready on the table. He waited for her to sit down and then gave her mug into her hand and passed her one of the two plates bearing the last of the fruit cake.
‘Lovely cake, Mrs Hamilton,’ he said nodding appreciatively, while Sarah looked in amazement at the transformation of this young man.
He not only looked different, he actually spoke unprompted, and in a voice and manner that suggested he was not a country boy. She could not, for the moment, detect any accent that might identify some other part of the country he might have come from, but he certainly spoke like a young man who’d had some education.
She found herself curious and wondered how she might find out more about him without upsetting him, but before she had time to decide what to do he put down his mug on the hearth and looked at her directly.
‘I’ve something to ask you and I’m not sure how to put it,’ he began. ‘It may be impossible and I don’t want to play on your generosity, but I want to be released from my apprenticeship.’
It was the longest utterance she’d ever heard him make and she sat silent, touched by his words and amazed by his articulate manner of speaking.
‘Why don’t you just put it as it comes to you?’ she asked gently.
‘You mean “as the spirit moves me”?’ he asked with a slight smile.
She laughed as she admitted that indeed that was almost certainly what she meant, but not everyone would appreciate her using those particular words.
He looked at her once again and said: ‘After my parents died, I went to a Quaker school in Dublin. I was given a place because I had no one to take me in. My parents were Quakers, but my uncle was not. To be honest, he was very hostile to all forms of belief. He had lost his wife in childbirth and from what little I’d heard of him he was full of bitterness.’
‘But it was he who arranged your apprenticeship, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, he did. I can’t understand why he did, because I’d never met him. Apparently he’d been approached by people from my parents’ Meeting who’d visited me at school. He agreed to pay for my apprenticeship if they would arrange it, but he made it very clear he did not wish to see me.’
‘And did you choose to be a smith?’
‘No, I wanted to go on at school …’
He broke off, his face twisted in distress. Whatever had happened to bring him to the forge, in answer, presumably, to a small advertisement in the paper, was still too painful to talk about. She was still wondering what she could say next when, to her great relief, he spoke again.
‘I used to go out and walk in the evenings and shortly after I came here I met an old man who’d been a schoolteacher. He lives on the far side of Loughgall and he has books, a whole roomful,’ he said, his eyes shining. ‘It’s a very small room, but every wall is covered with books. He has been so kind to me. He lends me anything I want and I read at night. But I told no one, not even Mister Hamilton. He must have wondered at the amount of oil the lantern in the loft used, but he never said a word about it.’
It was just then that Sarah remembered what Paddy McCann had said to her the afternoon before he took the trap away to be mended. He’d said then John had a gift: he saw things in people they didn’t see themselves. Whatever John had made of Ben, when some Quakers from the Ballyhagan Meeting had brought him to the forge, he must have seen something more than a strong pair of shoulders, just as he’d sensed Scottie would be at home in the forge, though at the time he had never seen him handle a horse.
‘There’s much to be learnt from books,’ said Sarah wistfully, thinking back to the days when she too had access to the books of other Quakers and to a small library in Lisnagarvey. Now her books were limited by her having the time to go to the library in Armagh, unencumbered by shopping bags.
‘What did you enjoy most?’ she asked quickly, realising she’d grown silent. She’d been thinking about Paddy McCann and his parting comment that Monday afternoon that he thought she had the same gift as John, to see something others might not see.
‘Travel and machinery and Irish history,’ he replied promptly. ‘But it’s the machinery that might get me a job if I go. The boss always let me repair machines, but I’d like to build machines and it would stand to me to have mended what’s broken. Sometimes, I can see ways that would have made them better in the first place.’
‘But you’ve never told anyone, have you?’
‘Only old Mr McMahon. That’s why he suggested I go to Canada. He said he could lend me the money for my ticket, but it would depend on being released from the apprentice agreement.’
‘Canada!’ she exclaimed, taken aback by all she’d heard. ‘You’d go alone to Canada?’
‘No, I’d not go alone. Apparently, there are parties going regularly from around here, sometimes organised by the minister of a church. There’s a couple of families going from around Loughgall and I’d be welcome to go with them. So Mr McMahon says.’
‘And when would you go?’
‘Later this month. It depends on the ice on the Saint Lawrence river. They want to go to Ontario. The first ships will sail as soon as they hear the ice is breaking up.’
‘Do you really want to go so far away? Would you not be homesick for Ireland?’ she asked, completely overcome by this revelation.
For the first time in her life, Sarah wondered how she herself could ever contemplate leaving Ireland. For her it seemed unthinkable. She knew little of Ireland first-hand apart from where she’d lived, but the sudden thought of never walking the country lanes or seeing its hawthorns laden with blossom in May was more than she could bear.
‘Oh yes, I want to go. If I’m homesick I’ll think about it then, but I have to make a life for myself. I’m nearly seventeen and I’ve no family, just Mary McCleery whom I call granny, though she’s not. She was once my nurse and she says I must go, that she’s not long for this world, and she’d be happy if she knew I’d gone with good people trying to make a better life.’
‘Then of course you must go,’ said Sarah promptly, her mind putting together all this new information about his history and his need to make a future of his own choosing. That she could well understand. Long before her grandmother became somewhat infirm, she had run their tiny household, making her own decisions, her own choices. However limited that life had been she’d had a freedom that Ben had never had.
‘But there is a problem,’ he said slowly.
‘And what is that, Ben?’ she asked, genuinely puzzled at to what it could be.
‘My uncle can’t, or won’t, repay the loss to you that my going will incur,’ he said, glancing away from her for the first time.
For a moment Sarah was puzzled, wondering how his uncle could be required to pay her money, but then she remembered. John had received a settlement for the six years of apprenticeship. He was required to provide board and lodging, a small sum of pocket money, work clothes and no doubt other things she didn’t know about. In return, he benefitted by the labour provided, something that increased with each year of training and experience. That was what should now be recompensed.
Afterwards, Sarah wondered if she had been hasty, but however much she argued with herself she could come to no other conclusion. She had, perhaps, spoken as the spirit moved her.
‘You’ll certainly be a loss, Ben,’ she began slowly. ‘I shall miss you. But there is nothing you have to repay to me,’ she went on firmly. ‘I’ll see what I can do to help you get ready for going,’ she added lightly. ‘Perhaps if I do some sewing for you, you could do some planting for me before the ice melts.’