Chapter Text
Spring in the Western Isles was the most incredible season John Thornton had ever experienced. The storms of winter had whipped themselves into exhaustion, leaving behind brilliant blues in sky and sea, ripples of cloud that were whiter than white, great flocks of seabirds soaring and carolling through the vasty air.
He felt a moment of regret as he and his little family boarded the steamer that was to take them to the mainland. Margaret and Frederick, who had lived through nine months of this extraordinary weather, were both tearful; Dixon, a loyal servant who had not been silent about the privations of her last year, and blamed Thornton for it all, had boarded in a relieved huff, their little baby clutched to her chest as most precious cargo. The fifth passenger on their voyage home, the Reverend Mr MacDiarmid, was stoic in his leave taking—he expected to be back again.
Thornton spent the first hour of their journey in the prow of the boat, relishing the bucking of the craft and the spray in his face, pleased to have found in himself new reserves of physical strength. But—even he must in time weary, and he left Frederick to enjoy the salt spray on his own. At the rear of the little ship, Margaret and MacDiarmid were in intent conversation. He should not be surprised, not really: Margaret, the orthodox churchwoman, had happily taken to the first priest with whom she had spoken in almost a year, even one of a different communion. MacDiarmid, for his part, had adopted the role of all older men who crossed her path and counted himself one of her conquered. But John waited, a little out of earshot, not wanting to intrude. Margaret suddenly looked up and, beaming as the glorious sun, held out her hand to him.
“I confess,” MacDiarmid was saying, “that I have been a little curious. You three have been most generous hosts, and I have enjoyed our fireside chats, but your splendid tales of past naval actions and the workings of Arkwright’s water frame have not the most obvious connection to your residence here. Not that it is my business to ask, of course.”
“For myself,” Thornton said, smiling, “I now consider myself well served if I should ever need to engage with the more vexing disputes of Kirk politics.”
“Indeed, indeed,” and MacDiarmid seemed happy to settle again into their tacit agreement to avoid explanations. But Margaret, it appeared, was feeling talkative.
“You see,” she said, “it is really quite complicated.”
***
Miss Margaret Hale had been raised carefully. Ladies did not slouch, and this had been a dictum that she had found easy to adhere to. That is, until today.
She sat in her father’s study, the day after he had died. The choleric humour was high in her, and she held her hands to burning cheeks; her limbs were heavy, languid; her mouth felt bruised. Edith had been right that you felt differently, after, and she noted again the internal ache that kept reminding her that she at least was alive, that kept the fiercer throbbing about her heart manageable. She leaned forward over her lap, leaned elbows on her knees, rubbed her wrists and hands with careful fingers. He would call soon, she knew it; his honour was too fine for any other action, nor any other question. Most mortifying of all the thoughts running feverishly through her brain was the knowledge that this man—temperamental, proud, fiercely intellectual, kind—was the soul she wished to cleave to: under any other circumstances but these. An offer would be goaded out of him, oh yes, forced again by sharp sympathy at her impulsive actions, and she had only herself to blame. She turned her face to the wall and tried to think.
There was a noise without, the front door opening, and she sat up quickly: but it was only Dixon returning from the market. Her mother’s maid bustled about the house, stowing marketing in the kitchen, tramping about upstairs. The door to the study burst open. “Oh, there you are, miss, I can see you’ve had your sleep out, I didn’t like to wake you this morning with the state you were in last night. I’ve a nice bit of crepe to trim up your gowns with—and I’d only just gotten you out of your blacks, to be sure, it’s a crying shame.” She nattered on about the massive snarl of traffic there had been in the nearby marketplace, a cotton lorry gone down the wrong lane had collided with a carriage, causing a mess of disruption to everyone’s day.
Margaret only half listened as Dixon chattered on, shook out the blankets from the pallet that had been made up on the floor of the study with a vindictive shake. “One thing’s for certain, that Mr Thornton won’t be bothering around here today. Him and his fine airs and his ‘I’m a magistrate,’ you have to do what I say. I’ll give you burglars. That man left our own front door unlocked this morning, and for how long there’s no answering. And you know how I’m not one to complain, mistress. Serves him right,” she added vengefully.
A thought completed its languid transmigration through Margaret’s wandering mind, and she looked up. “You said there’s been an accident?”
***
The great courtyard of the Marlborough Street Cotton Mill should have been boiling with activity. Margaret hesitated at the front gate, but there was a little knot of men whom she knew arguing out some matter a little way inside, and she ventured into the precinct to speak with them. She was a known figure, by then, the neighbour to many of these workers who lived out Princeton way, and they accosted her as they were wont to do, not with kind words or teasing, but fear.
“Is the measter dying, miss?” asked one, catching at her sleeve.
“That’s what I’m here to find out. Do you have no work to do, Andrews?” she asked coolly, and the little cluster that was Higgins and Williams the overlooker, and two fellows she had no knowledge of, opened to include her. “What is happening, Mr Higgins? Mr Williams?”
“Measter was brought in on a board, not even death warmed over, couple o’ hours gone,” Nick explained. He called over her shoulder: “James! Pollock! Those bales wonnut unload their sel’s! Th’house has been shut up tight since, but for the doctor. Williams here thinks we should be knocking ‘em up for instructions and a’.”
Margaret turned large eyes gloomily to the house. “What orders are you working on at this time, Mr Williams?”
“Big one for Harrison and Sons.”
“And how long will it take you to complete it?”
“Three and a half days. Three if we push oursel’s,” Nick answered for him.
This seemed clear enough. “Then finish out the order and ship it. Mr—or Mrs—Thornton will be able to give you better instructions tomorrow.”
“What if the measter’s dying?” one of the unknown men complained urgently. “I’m not working wi’out my pay; I’ve a family to feed.”
“Of course you will be paid,” Margaret said firmly. “Provided, that is, that you do your work and keep to your time.”
This seemed to settle the dispute, at least for now, and Margaret gathered up her skirts and marched to Marlborough House, trying not to quail under the weight of so many eyes upon her.
It took several knocks for the door to be answered, eventually, by Jane. She had wide eyes: “we’re not receiving callers, miss.”
“I came to assist,” Margaret said, stepping into the house. All was in disarray, the housekeeping for the day not done; two of the maids were hanging about in the dining room whispering to each other. On the sofa, Fanny had collapsed in a miserable heap, and Margaret was drawn to her there. Let Thornton’s sister do the weeping for the both of them.
“Fanny!” a stern voice cracked. “We do not have time for this!”
“Leave her be,” Margaret said harshly. “She cannot remember her own father dying, you’ve protected her from sorrow too well. She does not know how.”
Mrs Thornton loomed over the pair, inspecting the black silks of Margaret’s first mourning. “You are coming a little too strong, are you not, Miss Hale? For a man you threw over; who has not yet passed.”
“My papa is dead,” she said.
The old lady was taken aback. “I am sorry,” she said reluctantly. “And yet, as you have problems of your own, I must ask why you are here today.”
“I came to help. Please. If I stay at home I will think too much and then—it’s better if I have something to do.” Margaret stood up urgently, settled Fanny with an absent pat on her shoulder. “And you need help, Mrs Thornton, even if it’s just someone to run the house for you while you attend your son.”
Mrs Thornton stared at her for a long time, as grim as granite. Finally, she nodded. “I must be upstairs in a minute. I came down for fresh linen.”
Margaret nodded once, sharply, and walked into the kitchen to see what they were doing. She was rousting the maids into setting the copper boiling and directing the cook to prepare a cold meat dinner when there was pounding on the door. She went to open it herself, to be presented with a burly rouster in a semblance of a suit who shoved some papers in her face. “Bills for you,” he said abruptly.
The fellow was some half a head taller than she, but Margaret managed to look down her nose at him anyway, her head thrown back in its swan-curve. “You may take any invoices to the counting house of the mill.”
She was shutting the door when he put his boot in the door. “Don’t try that with me, miss. My master wonnut go wi’out his money.”
“You will be paid,” she said coldly, but perforce accepted the papers.
More came later, when Margaret was writing out a receipt for the restorative her mother had been used to make for the invalids of the parish.
“They say the master will die,” Jane said, ghoulish.
“And if he doesn’t die, then he will need to be nursed up,” Margaret told her patiently. “Anything your kitchen does not have already, go to the market for directly. Alice, I told you to take some cold meats up for Mrs Thornton and the doctor!” She checked her watch with a grimace, and looked up at Jane’s re-entrance.
“Bills, miss,” Jane said primly and, turning on her heel, left again.
Margaret sighed and took the papers to the dining room, started opening envelopes. The sums were eye-watering to her, a girl who had been used to running a house on 25£ a quarter. She gathered them up grimly and snatched up her cloak. There was one truth she could hold on to: the failure of Marlborough Mills would kill Mr Thornton just as surely as any dint on the head. One merciful moment of humour struck her, the thought of a woeful ghost haunting the spinning room and loading yard, insisting that the new tenants correct their business. Oh papa, papa, she thought, what would you do?
She found Nick Higgins in the yard again, directing unloading. He looked up at her warily, in fear and in hope. “Your master is expected to live,” she lied, clearly enough for others to hear her, “but he will need careful nursing. Nick—would you please show me the counting house? Some creditors have been sending invoices to the house, in error.”
“Ay, I can imagine,” Nick said grimly, and spat on the ground. “Asking your pardon, Miss Marget. Come wi’ me.”
He knocked on the little office door sharply. “Porritt, Gregson. Miss Hale has been deputed to oversee the accounts. Do as she says, will yo’?” He tugged his cap and went back to his work.
Margaret sat gingerly on one of the visitor’s chairs and listened to the two young clerks pour their hearts out. There was a great deal of disorder, she realised, more than these young men knew how to handle, and she wondered at it, until she recalled that Mr Thornton had been spinning about the world for more than a month, expecting to draw all back into his capable hands on his return. And he had been coming through Crampton marketplace at that precise time to see her. She closed her eyes. Oh, papa.
She looked up and pretended more assurance than she felt. “Thank you, Mr Porritt, Mr Gregson. Will you please keep working on the day books as you have been doing, and pack up the accounting and order books for—Mrs Thornton to review? She will have more guidance for you tomorrow.”
She laid the books out on the dining table, wracking her brains for old anecdotes told genially to her papa, scornfully to herself, the easy chatter of mill owners at a long ago dinner: no kind of education for this strange day. After an hour of totting up, she stood, smoothing her skirts, her lips pressed together. She made a pass through the lower floors of the house, chivvied maids—there was no sign of Fanny, who might have guided her into forbidden territory.
Hesitating, she crept up the stairs, waited at the end of the hall, watching the shut doors of the family area in trepidation. One door opened, and Mrs Thornton came out; an old woman, older than her years.
“Mrs Thornton?” Margaret whispered, too daunted to use her normal voice. “There is a problem with the mill. The mill accounts, I mean. The clerks do not know how to manage it.”
The old woman turned to her with pained exasperation. “You must protect the payroll, Miss Hale. The hands will not stick through lost wages. Everything else runs on credit.”
“Yes. I—it’s the other bills I don’t know how to handle. There are so many! So many today, and suppliers threatening to take back stock, and the bank saying it will withdraw its overdraft. I only know how to budget for housekeeping, ma’am. Is there—is there some friend of Mr Thornton’s who could manage in his place? Until he recovers?”
With an oath, Mrs Thornton strode down the stairs, found the pile of papers and stirred through them, her face savage. “Vultures!” she spat. “They fear to be left with debts if the mill fails, so they crowd in to finish the job.” She stalked through the house, acquiring cloak and bonnet. “I must make some calls. You must manage until I return, Miss Hale.”
Margaret sat at the dining table, listening to the ticking clock—all was silent, else, and her traitorous thoughts ran rapid, rabid through her brain again. She was alive was all she knew.
After an age a servant startled her from her long meditation. “Mrs Thornton has had to go out,” she told the girl dumbly. But it was she who was wanted, and reluctantly she ascended into the upper floors of her house, approached the room where Mr Thornton lay dying. She peeped in, averted her face a moment from the stench of faeces and vomit. “The girl said you wanted me, Dr Donaldson? Mrs Thornton has gone from the house to undertake urgent business.”
“There,” the doctor told her, “I need a big strong girl who will not faint.”
“I don’t faint,” Margaret said quietly. This was a lie, but she could hold to it.
The Scotsman had laid out the room as if to do surgery. On the bed, Mr Thornton lay, deadly pale, gasping painful stertorous breaths, at every gasp looking as if he were about to speak then fading further. “I would not be trying this procedure, you understand,” the doctor explained, “if I were not desperate, and not at all in the Infirmary; the risk of infection is too high. Wash your hands, then wash them again—with this.” He held out a bottle of some sharp smelling liquid.
“Is this what they teach in Edinburgh?” Margaret asked, complying.
“Vienna. There’s a man-midwife who recommends it.” She nodded, eyes huge, unable to distract herself from the patient’s laboured breathing any longer. “Mr Thornton has bleeding in his brain, do you understand? I need to open a hole in his skull to let the blood clot out. You must keep him very still, Miss Hale.”
“I will do my best,” she told him and, approaching the bed, looked at John for the first time. She gripped his hand. “Mr Thornton? John. You have been very brave today, and you must be braver still.” She held him tightly as the doctor shaved a large part of his head, wishing she could breathe for him and ease those laboured agonising gasps, willing him to wake. At Donaldson’s direction, she held Thornton’s face as still as she might, as the doctor produced a steel cylinder with wicked looking spikes on one end and began grinding it into bone. “Oh please,” she said. Margaret was dancing on the edge of an abyss, and everyone she knew was falling into it. “Please, John. You saved a life today—I spoke to the child’s mother—it is well. You saved a life, and every day will be brighter for that knowledge, you may exult in your existence for your service, for your humanity. But you need to fight—please, doctor, you’re hurting him!”
“A little longer, Miss Hale.”
Mr Thornton drew in a final laboured breath, so prolonged she thought he might tear open his chest. At last his eyes flew open, and he looked at her in solemn surprise, hands reaching up to grip her wrists. “Miss Hale! You had no need to come here. You knew I would call today—”
“All is well,” she promised, unable to stop the pricking in her eyes, or the drops of tears falling onto his face. Now that she could finally cry, she didn’t know how to stop. “You must rest.”
***
“And then… I realised what had happened—about Grace—I was so frightened. John knew at some level, although he could not remember anything else very much, at all, and it was worrying him, agitating him. I thought—I thought if I left then he would forget properly and could concentrate on getting well. No. That’s too self-serving. I couldn’t bear to make an exhibit of myself and ran away.” John reached over and held tightly to her hand.
“I feel better, being able to confess somehow.” Margaret looked down shyly at their hands gripping the rail. “It seems very wrong to be feeling so happy today from committing such a fault.”
“And would you feel better if I’d made you stand up the front of the kirk while I denounced ye both? You’ve made yourself right in God’s eyes. I will tell you this, lass. Everyone in my congregation has a problem of their own: no one has time to fret about yours.”
They put into the little village then, Mallaig, that doubled as a seaport, a small neat place with cottages white in their walls and steep in their rooves. Frederick had made plans here, and they walked out around a little cove to where he could start on his journey home to Spain: a disreputable ‘fishing’ vessel was waiting for him, his acquaintance with which Frederick had waved off with “you get to know people.”
He and Margaret talked for a long time out on the beach, the froth of waves almost crashing over their feet; she in her bundle of homespun, he in a greatcoat, his lithe graceful head bent over hers. John had been wrung with jealousy the first time he had seen these two thus, in the setting sun. He knew better now, he had made friends with his unknowing enemy: the glorious sun had warmth for them both.
“He is a very pleasant sort of rascal, your brother-in-law.”
“He is,” John said, laughing, “I will miss him very much.” He held out his hands to the unexpected priest. “I think this is good bye from us. And God Speed, I hope.”
“Always,” MacDiarmid told him.
***
John and Frederick had walked down to the little village of their island, the day the ferry was due: he to negotiate passage with the ferry captain, Frederick to make provision for the little flock of hardy black double-horned sheep he had been keeping, and the humble donkey that had stood the family in good service.
John walked out on the dock and nodded in surprise to the black-clad stranger who was climbing out of the steam ship. “Fesker ma!” —he had been trying to learn to speak with the locals.
The older man, seamed and grey, with a dog collar at his throat, nodded amiably. “Faaltshæ.”
“Kimmer a ha shiv?” John ventured, feeling proud of his new language acquisition.
“Ha gu ma!”
Behind him, John could hear his brother-in-law-to-be giggling. He turned in confusion.
“Good morning, Reverend MacDiarmid!” Frederick said, “I hope you are well today?”
“Yes, yes, young Mr Dickinson, it has been a pleasant journey.” The old priest had the lilt of an educated Edinburgh man. John glared at Frederick in reproof.
“Reverend MacDiarmid came to visit in the autumn,” Frederick explained.
“Aye, that’s right. St Clare is a priestless island, but not a godless one. I come out from the mainland a couple of times a year to baptise any bairns that have been born, and take communion for those that wish it.”
“Well,” said John, a grin slowly spreading across his face. “Then I have a babe for you to baptise, and a fiancée for you to church and marry.”
***
You could manage the journey from Mallaig to Glasgow in two days, if you were pushing yourself, which they were not. They travelled in a series of carrier’s carts and post chaises, step by step, with frequent stops for the convenience of Margaret and her child, through high sere mountains decked in green and brown. Finally, they reached the northmost point of Loch Lomond, and a better class of inn; Margaret disappeared into the little chamber they had booked for the night, and reappeared in the attire of a gentlewoman, clean and combed. She was shy of him, now, a little tentative formality from the easy ways of their island sojourn. She bowed her head slightly and smoothed down the wool of her travelling habit, with little careful movements of her fingers.
“You are beautiful, Mrs Thornton,” he told her with a smile. He let his smile grow: “you were beautiful this morning.” He offered his arm and suggested they take a stroll along the lake shore while they waited for their dinner to be dressed.
Margaret looked up at the looming hills across the lake, shrouded with mist in the afternoon sky. “It’s farewell to these mountains,” she said, a little wistfully. “We came here for shelter, you understand; I never thought to find it so beautiful.”