HELEN HAD LOST COUNT of the blows and kicks, agonies blooming red all over her body, when the punch came that cracked her skull and shook something loose deep inside her ear. The noise of the room was gone, James’s grunts and curses, and instead all was ringing, dizzy, sick.
His hands were on her neck then, and Helen knew she was going to die, for there was no breath but there was vomit coming up, with nowhere to go, she would surely choke twice over.
Then suddenly the pressure was gone. She turned on her side and vomited, agonisingly spitting out mouthfuls of a sticky pudding her body had made of the morning’s oatmeal mixed with blood. When that was done she spat out stream upon stream of snot, her lips mumbling around something hard and sharp – a tooth, part of a tooth – and then another.
‘A tooth for every child,’ her mother’s voice said in her head, in tune with the ringing, ‘that’s what the bearing costs you.’ The new child Helen was carrying could not have survived James’s punches, she knew that, long experience told her that. She retched again, and Mother’s voice was gone; the howl of broken ribs joined the singing in her ears instead.
Hours later, or perhaps it was only minutes, when it occurred to Helen to wonder what had become of James, she found she had to use her legs to turn herself and look, as she could not lift her broken body with one of her arms hanging useless by her side. Her left eye would not open at all, it was crusted shut. The right would open just a slit, and it took a moment before she could make sense of what she was seeing.
James was slumped against the table leg, his face swollen beyond recognition, almost, his eyes red and popping and his mouth like the pout on a fish, the lips swollen and purple and gaping. His tongue stuck out between, a strange purply grey, and his chest heaved but it seemed he could get no air. He lifted his meaty arm and thumped his own chest once, twice, three times, leaving a ghost of his fist on the cloth of his shirt in Helen’s blood. But he had not cleared the obstruction, if obstruction it was, and then his whole face seemed to be turning purple, his lips as dark as sloes, the tongue black.
‘Hhhh—’ he wheezed, meaning ‘Helen’, perhaps, or ‘Help’, but he could manage no more, and as Helen stared, his eyes lost their focus and his head slumped to one side.
Helen watched for a moment, then two, then five. When she was very sure he would not be coming for her again, she laid her head on the ground and passed out.
Helen’s one working eye had closed on candlelight; she opened it next to see the thin grey light of dawn. She was panicked at first, muddled, her body not her own, stiff and broken and everywhere clotted with blood and pain. A wild fear took her then, and she skittered backwards against the wall, looking around for James, who must be waiting in the morning light to finish her once and for all. Her heart only stilled when she saw him, slumped on the floor by the table, his eyes strange and clouded, staring at nothing. Dead and gone to Hell.
Slowly, inch by agonising inch, Helen dragged herself towards her husband’s corpse and the door beyond. As she passed him, some childish fear compelled her to reach out and check that he was truly gone. His skin was cold, and in the shadow below his jaw, among the stubble, Helen’s fingers touched the hard pin of something that did not belong. She fumbled until she had a grasp on the thing and could pull it out. She held it up to the meagre light cast by the oilcloth window and tried to focus with her slitted eye. A bee sting, that was all.
Helen’s fingers curled round the sting as she began again to pull herself towards the door. She needed help, she knew that, her wounds were bad and she had begun to feel a different pain, a gnawing, dragging pain low down in her belly, as the child began to come away. Effie would know what to do. She might curse her, tell her she was a fool for staying; hadn’t Effie told her enough times to leave the drunken, vicious sot and go home to her father in the country? But Effie would always see Helen right.
She lost the bee sting as she struggled to open the door, but by then Helen was beyond caring. She lost her grasp on the catch and tumbled across the threshold to lie at last in a daze of pain, in the mess and dirt of the street outside. Her skirts were heavy and wet beneath her, whether with piss or blood she had no way of telling. The rain fell on her, cold and driving, as she waited for the folk of Leith to stir.
After hours, or what seemed like hours, a door opened and the cry went up. A lad hammered on Effie’s door and Effie lumbered out in as much of a run as she could manage, winding a shawl about her head as she went. She knelt, painfully, and held her hand at Helen’s lips, muttering a prayer as she felt for breath.
‘She’s breathing!’ Effie shouted, and then she was bawling for a sheet and men to lift Helen into it – ‘Gentle, lads, gentle!’ – so she could be borne into Effie’s flat. Effie’s grown daughter Maggie was shooed half-asleep from her bed and Helen was laid in it while Effie pressed a ha’penny into a young lad’s hand and told him to fetch Agnes Duncan. Then she swung the kettle over the fire and ordered Maggie to the well for more water and her boy Geordie round the stair for such rags as the neighbours could spare.
Helen listened to the bustle through the muffling and buzzing in her ears. She was tired, almost sleeping, and it seemed as though she had left her body and was watching from somewhere else. But that relief didn’t last, an awful pain deep in her belly was drawing her back down. She tried to curl herself around the pain but something sharp stabbed in in her side and she cried out. Effie’s hands were on her then, soothing her, helping her back up onto the pillow until the peak passed and she was limp again. Effie fetched a rag and warm water from the kettle and began to clean Helen’s face. The closed eye gradually came unstuck; it seemed it had only been sealed shut with blood. Helen could see Effie’s lined old face, concentrating on her work.
Effie caught her eye and pursed her lips. ‘He’s made a mess of you this time, lass, and that’s for sure,’ she said. ‘You can’t go back. Not ever again.’
‘He’s dead,’ Helen slurred.
‘What?’
‘He’s dead.’
Effie laid down her basin.
‘Nay, lass,’ she said. ‘You haven’t killed him?’
‘No,’ Helen said. ‘He just . . . died. I think it was a bee.’
‘Right, aye,’ Effie said absently, clearly thinking Helen had gone daft. Then she called for Maggie to sit with Helen while she went next door. Helen dozed for a bit, then woke again, in pain, and saw that Effie was back, and Agnes Duncan was with her.
Effie seemed lost in thought as Agnes bent over Helen and began to examine her.
‘I’ll go to Andrew Fisher,’ Effie said. ‘He’s an elder in the Kirk. He’ll know what to do. The bastard’s dead alright, I’ve never seen the like of it. His face all swollen and blue, like he’d been hanged.’
‘Hanging’d be too good for him,’ said Agnes. Then she raised Helen’s skirts and slid a finger inside her, and Helen howled in protest.
‘Bide here for now,’ she said to Effie. ‘The dead are in no hurry, and I have need of you.’
Then Agnes washed her hands, speaking crisply and kindly to Helen as she did so.
‘I’m sorry, lass, but your travails arna over yet. I’d spare you it if I could, but I cannot. Your waters have broken and the pains you feel are birth pangs. You’re doing fine, but there’s a fair way to go. You’ve done it before, you know what to do, and we’ll help you as best we can.’
‘But surely . . . Won’t it just . . . come away by itself?’ Effie asked. ‘I lost three back in the day, before they quickened.’
‘She’s six months gone, at least,’ said Agnes. ‘There’s nothing for it but for her to birth this poor wee craitur, broken ribs or no. Do you have whisky in the house? And a clean shift? I need to set her arm back in first, and she’ll puke when I do it.’
When all was over, the agony of the arm and the long struggle of the labour and the birthing, Helen lay in a daze of pain and drink and watched Agnes and Effie as they covered the thing that lay in Effie’s basin with a cloth.
‘What will you do with it?’ she asked, forming the words as best she could.
‘Bury it in the yard,’ Agnes said. ‘Is that what you want? I’ll say a prayer, if you like.’
Helen closed her eyes. ‘James always fed them to the dogs, when I lost them. He said to do other was a waste.’
Agnes stared then swallowed, hard. She and Effie exchanged a look.
‘Aye, well,’ Effie said. ‘He’s deid.’
Helen spent more than a month at Effie’s, in the end, sleeping in Maggie’s truckle bed while Maggie bunked in with her mother in the box-bed in the wall. Agnes came daily, for the first week, to bandage her ribs and see to the milk till it dried up, and dose her with herbs against fever. She came less after that, twice a week perhaps, and one day she brought with her a kitten pinned into her blouse, a runt another wife had thrown into the street from the second storey of a tenement. She asked Helen to keep it in the bed with her. She could feed it milk from the jug, Agnes said, watered down a wee bit, and that way they both might have the comfort of one another.
Effie snorted at that, but she fetched the milk herself until Helen was well enough to be on her feet. The wee tabby cat survived, and then it thrived, and Father Black said they should call it Jezebel after the queen in the Bible, for she had been thrown out of a window too, only that Jezebel’s landing had a sorrier end.
Father Black came often, to sit with Helen, and to help as best he could to settle the matters of their lodging room and monies owing to her from James MacDougal’s employers at the sawmill. Not that there was a lot he could do – folk of James MacDougal’s faith were sorely abused, and even a priest had little standing – but he spoke for Helen, as did Effie’s minister, since Helen had been raised a Presbyterian. In the end a small amount was settled on her in respect of wages owing, the furnishings of their room and her husband’s tools. James himself had been laid to rest two days after his death, in the local burying ground. The mortsafe went into the grave with him, a great cage that contained the coffin so that none should dig it up and open it once it was in the ground. Two friends of James’s had paid for it, it seemed, rough types who owed him a gambling debt. The safe would soon be dug up again, Father Black told Helen, James would be of no use to the graverobbers’ customers now, but Helen had no need to worry about any of it.
‘Indeed!’ Effie snorted.
Father Black did his best not to hear. No, he said, there was nothing to do at all, all was in hand and the two men well pleased to receive half of James’s store of whisky in thanks. The rest had gone to Agnes, with some coin, food, and small crocks, and she too had been well pleased with her payment.
At last Helen was well, or as well as she might expect to be. Her ear had never healed properly, so she had to incline her head towards a speaker to hear them over the strange ringing sound in her ears. She had been weak, after so long abed, but as soon as Helen could stand, she asked for a broom for the floor or a pot to scour; she had been a burden to Effie long enough. Effie was kind, said if she had had the room, Helen might have stayed as long as she liked, but Helen knew she did not have the room. Maggie was grumbling and bleary-eyed from Effie’s snoring, and she needed her own bed back. And so, Helen gave Effie as much of her money as the older woman would accept and tied the few things she still owned into a bundle. She thought about leaving Jezebel – she was a fierce mouser – but in the end the cat leapt up beside her on the cart that was to take her towards her father’s village by Falkirk, and so it seemed the choice was not Helen’s to make.
The carter took Helen along the road south of Polmont and let her off before Falkirk, at the crossroads by Parkhill Woods. From there she walked to Redding with Jezebel following, darting here and there into the grass after insects and beasties, then returning to wind around her mistress’s legs as though she was determined to trip her up.
Helen saw Peter Gaff before he saw her, sitting on the stoop outside his house mending a pair of boots. He looked up, shading his eyes against the sun, and peered at her for a moment as one might a stranger. Then recognition came, and he got to his feet and drew her to him. Suddenly shy, Helen stooped her head. She knew she still looked a state; her face was clean enough and much of the swelling gone down, but the ghosts of the bruises still showed and her lip was not quite healed. Her father put her from him and looked at the ground.
‘We never knew,’ he said. ‘When you married him, we had no idea he was a brute.’
‘How would you?’ Helen asked. ‘You never raised a hand to my mother.’
‘No,’ said Peter, ‘nor anyone else either.’
He shook his head and sighed.
‘Come away in,’ he said. ‘I’ll see what I can find to eat and drink. The others will be back and looking for their dinner soon anyway.’
But Helen hung back for a moment.
‘Do they know?’ she asked. ‘That their father’s dead?’
‘Aye,’ he said. ‘All the bairnies know. But Helen . . . ’ He broke off and shook his head again.
‘What?’
‘Your lasses . . . They know you’re their mam, and they know James was their da. But . . . they know because I’ve told them. They know it to be true, they don’t feel it. This is their home, they forget I’m their granda, no their da.’
Helen’s eyes smarted. ‘They don’t remember living with me and James?’
He shook his head once more. ‘They were too wee, when it happened.’
Helen closed her eyes for a second, hearing once again the cry as Maisie tumbled into the fire. It was so clear in her mind that she thought her father might hear it, too, but he just stooped through the door and into the shady room inside. After a second, Helen followed.
The children began to wander in, in ones and twos, as Peter laid out cheese and bannocks and small ale and milk. He sent them to complete their chores and to wash and then they all crowded round the table together to eat, the wee ones keeking under their lashes at the stranger in their midst, reddening if they caught her eye. Helen sat with her brother John and sister Grace on the bench – they were sixteen and eighteen now, Grace home for her day off from service and John apprenticed to a joiner and going there every morning and home at night. Peter sat on a stool with Helen’s wee daughter Annie on his knee and said the Grace, thanking God for the food and their health to enjoy it. Helen looked round the room, bare and small but trig and clean with its limewashed walls and scrubbed table, and thought of her mother. Mam had been gone four years now, although still Helen expected to see her take her place beside Father and begin to hand round the bannocks. Helen’s older girl Maisie stood with Margaret and Elspeth and Andrew on the other side of the table. In the low light, the scar on her face seemed gone, almost, although Helen’s fingers itched still to reach out and feel the rough shine of it. Instead, she focused on her bannock, breaking a piece off and choking it down with a sip of ale.
Jezebel was an instant favourite of the younger children, and when they had eaten and attended to their chores, Maisie and Margaret spent much of the evening pulling around a piece of string for her to chase. When they went to bed with the other girls, Jezebel went with them, although Helen knew she would abandon them in the middle of the night to attend to her mousing. Hopefully they would wake to a row of little corpses on the floor, instead of in their bedclothes.
Helen slept with Grace and their sister Lizzie that night, and she liked it. She saw now how much she had missed having company, James MacDougal always out drinking and Helen’s bairnies sent away so she had always slept alone.
In the morning, she helped dress the children and wash their faces, and when they had gone off to work or lessons, she picked up a basket of mending and took it outside into the warm day. Her father joined her with his tools and wood, and they passed a quiet forenoon together, Peter carving soles for his shoes and boots and Helen darning and mending shirts and stockings, trousers with threadbare seats, and fourth-hand jackets falling apart at the seams.
At last, Peter stretched and yawned and said he would put some stew on the fire for their dinner. Helen finished patching a worn-out elbow, bit off her thread and followed him inside.
‘There’s work at the harvest over by,’ he said, as they ate. ‘I’m heading over myself, next week, make a bit of money to add to the cobbling. Do you want me to tell them you’ll come too?’
Helen swallowed.
‘I thought maybe I could stay here a while longer,’ she said. ‘I could care for the bairnies while you’re gone.’
Her father looked at his soup.
‘I canna keep you, Helen,’ he said. ‘I can barely feed my own bairns, even with the money John and Grace bring home, and then I have yours as well. And . . . well . . . looking after bairns is no . . . ’ He tailed off and shoved a spoonful of stew into his mouth.
No for me, Helen thought. Even though it was long, long syne, that terrible day Maisie went into the fire, and not like any of the bairns were on leading reins now.
‘Besides,’ Peter said, through a mouthful of bread, ‘the harvest will be great crack for you, Helen. You can camp with the other women, save yourself the tramp back; you always liked that, liked company and a drink.’
‘Aye,’ said Helen, and it was true, she did like company and a drink. But it was hard when a women had to choose between that and her own bairns. She had no need of whisky in the morning anymore, after all, had only ever taken it to dull the ache of James’s latest beating – he’d cracked her tooth, that time when Maisie fell, and part of it had remained in her gum and half-crazed her.
‘I’ll set you out there,’ Peter said, ‘and leave you with the women. Lizzie’ll mind the bairns here, she’s a steady lass.’
‘Very well,’ said Helen, though she wasn’t pleased.
Peter was as good as his word, letting the wife who was heading up the women’s and children’s gangs know that Helen was coming with him, and walking her out there himself before he went off with his scythe to join the reapers. She was set to work alongside three women she didn’t know, all from further afield than herself.
Rachel was a great strong red-head, taller than most men, and as fond of a drink as Helen herself. Betsey was a cottar’s wife, small and dark and well used to hard work. She was happy to be away from home and her husband for a few weeks; according to her he was a feckless article, more like to gamble away their money than use it to feed their bairns. Betsey’s wages would go in her own pocket, she swore, and he wouldn’t have any chance to fritter it all away. Then there was Jean, a widow woman who had no home to call her own and instead went from place to place seeking work. She was a kindly soul, and Helen liked her best of all. The four of them worked together, and they slept together in a rough tent, and one of the others would always go with you when you went to piss; you couldn’t be too careful with so many men around.
It was a good month, for all Helen began it in ill-humour. The work was hard and in the first days she felt the weakness of her body, her damaged shoulder aching so she had to pause and stretch her arm above her head, and her ribs still sore. She was hard-pressed to get herself moving in the morning, so seized up she seemed. As the days wore on, though, she felt herself grow stronger, her shoulder eased and the bending became easier and she was able to keep up with the others and even outstrip Jean. The weather held, and they made good progress, following the reapers up through the rigs, binding the sheaves and gathering them into stooks to dry. They began at dawn and stopped when the sun was at its highest for the midday meal, oatcakes and bannocks and cheese and meat the farmer’s wife brought out with a great team of helpers, with good ale to drink or whey for those that liked it better. Then the gangs set to again until dusk, and when at last it was too dark to continue, they sat together round their bonfires, drinking and talking, exchanging snuff and tobacco for their pipes. Many of the workers were Travellers and other tramping folk, but at least half of them just locals pressed into service, and with hours so long they chose to camp in the fields most nights and enjoy the drink and song and company.
There was a large band of Irish, from all over the north of that island, and among them were a wheen of fine singers and storytellers who were in great demand around the fires. Rachel paired off with one of them, an older man named Seán, and seemed well pleased with her lot. The others were much enamoured of another man, one William, a stocky creature with thick ginger hair and a pleasant, open face. He had a snub nose, too, almost like a child’s, but his body was solid and strong. He was well spoken and Betsey said she’d heard he was a nobleman’s son, but Rachel said that was nonsense; proud of the knowledge she had from Seán, she was, lording it over them. The family had had money, she said; Seán had heard his father was a lawyer or a doctor, something like that, but there had been an almighty falling out and now William Burke was down on his luck and no better than any of them, for all his handsome face and dainty speech.
‘He’d keep a woman warm at night,’ Jean said longingly, one night when he was singing by the fire.
William looked over at that and Helen coloured, thinking he had heard, but he didn’t look at Jean; instead he looked at Helen and smiled, bowing his head as though it was to her he sang and not to the twenty or more folk around the fire. It was a pleasant sensation, for all she was sure it was nothing more than that easy charm all the Irishmen seemed to have when they were in their cups of an evening. She couldn’t understand the words of the song, it was in their own language, but it sounded bonnie enough, what she could hear of it, and she ducked her head down to listen over that bell that was her constant companion, ringing in her ears.
It had been a long time since Helen had thought of a man with anything other than dread, or of herself as a woman that a man might look at, except maybe with pity, or disgust, as she cringed past on the street, head bowed to hide the bruisings and swellings of her face. She knew her figure was decent, she wasn’t tall and strong like Rachel but she had a neat enough shape, although her chest was flat. Her hair was a reddish brown, darker than Rachel’s bright ginger, and straighter, and there was no grey in it yet. None of the harvest women had a looking glass, but Jean had a wee knife, polished to a shine, and Helen did her best to see herself in it, although it cut her up into slivers – dark eyes, turning down at the corners, and heavy brows with a great deep crease between them, a long nose, and lips that were neither thin nor full. She was lucky James had taken the teeth from the back of her mouth only, and it didn’t show if she was careful not to smile too widely. Her cheeks were tanned, her nose as well, but they all had that, working outside in all weathers. As far as she could tell, she was no beauty, but she had nothing to be ashamed of, for all the ill-treatment her face had taken in its time.
The next night, she waited until there was a lull and then she sang, quiet at first but then swelling out as her nerves fell away, her favourite of the songs she’d learned from her mother, ‘Auld Robin Grey’. It was the story of a young lass who loved a lad called Jamie, but he had no wealth and so had gone to sea, vowing to make his fortune before he returned to marry her. But then her parents were ruined and the lass forced to marry an old man, and kind though he was to her, her heart was broken when Jamie returned and found her lost to him.
Helen had a decent voice still – the choking James had given her seemed to have done no permanent harm – and she received a warm round of clapping and cheering when she was done. Someone pressed a stone bottle into her hands and she clutched it in shaking hands and took a swig from it – whisky, it was, and good and strong. She found herself tired out then, and she said to Jean that she would go to her bed. Jean got up to go with her, although Helen could see she would have preferred to stay.
As they made their way to the tent, they brushed against a man’s body in the dark. He raised a lantern he carried and smiled at them, and Helen saw it was William Burke.
‘Nelly,’ he said, and for a stupid moment Helen didn’t realise it was her he meant. ‘You’re not leaving, are you? I was hoping for another song.’
‘I am,’ Helen said. ‘I’m tired.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘there’s not so many nights left now,’ and he drew her back to the fire, bringing her to sit beside him and passing her a bottle. Jean drew back, returning to her own place by the fire.
‘You’re a fine wee céirseach, Nelly,’ William said. ‘That’s what we call a blackbird in Ireland.’ He laughed. ‘You’d be a Missus Blackbird,’ he said, ‘with your bonnie brown hair. A sweet voice you have, and something in the way you hold your head reminds me of a blackbird too.’
Helen blushed. ‘I don’t hear well on this side,’ she said. ‘It was a blow to my head. It took away my hearing.’
‘Who did that to you?’ William asked.
‘My husband,’ Helen said. ‘He . . . well, he’s dead now and it doesn’t matter.’
William seemed shocked. ‘Oh, Nelly,’ he said. He put a hand on her back and she felt it burn her, almost, like a brand. ‘Mo chéirseach bheag.’
Helen didn’t return to her tent that night, or any of the other nights of that harvest season. Instead she slept with William in a bow-tent he had constructed of branches, on a bed of leaves and good woollen blankets. The first night he held her, that was all, and she lay awake the whole night through. He kissed her in the morning, when the first notes of birdsong woke the camp, and they were late to the morning muster.
A few days later, on the Sabbath, Helen woke at first light to find the weather turned cold of a sudden, and a dead bee lying on the leaves before her eyes. She picked it up and turned it over, looking for the sting in its behind. Then she turned over, careful not to disturb William, who had been deep in drink the previous night and was sound asleep. She pressed the bee sting into his skin and held her breath. Nothing happened. Relieved, Helen closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep, thinking of a blackbird’s nest, cosy and snug. She did not want the harvest to end.