The Shadow of the Sycamores Read online

  ‘We shall have to wait and see then. Now, I will get the pony and trap ready for you and you will go to The Sycamores to impart the good news … and bring Fay back with you.’

  At The Sycamores, things had gone much further than either Joseph or Catherine could have imagined. When Janet told her husband the night before about ‘the poor young lassie’s father throwing her out’, he had applied his not inconsiderable knowledge to trying to find a sensible solution and had roused her in the middle of the night to tell her what had occurred to him.

  ‘In Scotland, there is what is called an “irregular” marriage ceremony. Both the parties concerned make a declaration of their commitment to each other in front of at least one witness and this has to be recorded in Aberdeen to make it legal.’

  Janet looked somewhat sceptical. ‘But doesn’t the witness need to be a minister or a member of the clergy?’

  ‘No. Anyone is acceptable – an ordinary man or even a woman – and I am quite willing to fulfil the task.’

  ‘But Henry might want Max to do it … as his best friend?’

  ‘If that’s the case, Max will no doubt be pleased to step in and perhaps Fay would like you to be present too.’

  Fay and Henry were given this news straight away and they lost no time in making their declaration of commitment to each other before Max and Janet, their chosen witnesses. By the time Catherine arrived at The Sycamores, bride, groom and witnesses were on their way to Aberdeen to have the declaration legalised. Catherine almost swooned when Innes Ledingham told her but, perfect gentleman that he was, he revived her with a small glass of brandy and sat with her for over an hour to make sure that she was well enough to drive the trap home.

  As she drew nearer to Drymill, her heart began to churn with the fear of Joseph’s reaction to this latest development. She expected him to fly into a red-hot fury but he closed the shop and stumbled, white-faced, upstairs to sit down.

  ‘Do not take it so badly,’ she urged. ‘How were you to know that they would take the law into their own hands?’

  ‘If I had not acted in such a ridiculous, uncalled for manner …’

  ‘It is too late for ifs. The deed will have been done by now and we will just have to accept it. You will accept it, will you not?’

  ‘I have no choice,’ he muttered, ‘but I would have wished things had turned out differently.’

  ‘At least, as Mr Ledingham assured me, they were in separate rooms last night so that is a blessing. Fay has committed no sin.’

  At that moment, the irregular marriage was being recorded and thus made legal and, although the room was small, dim and not particularly clean, Fay scarcely noticed it. The wedding ring had been bought from a jeweller on their walk from the railway station and, when Henry slipped it on to her finger, she considered herself the happiest girl alive. The registrar was a tall, lanky man with grizzled hair and a bushy moustache, abrupt in his manner, even accusing – as if they were too young to be married. He had some difficulty in pronouncing Henry’s real first name and got it out eventually with a deep scowl. But what did any of that matter? In no time, the ceremony, as such, was over. Max and Janet signed their names in the large book on the table first, then Fay, then Henry who had been told that he must sign the foreign name to make it legal.

  Out in the street again, Janet said that Innes had given her money to treat them to a meal before they went back, so they all trooped into the Royal Oak Hotel in the Castlegate where, for the first time, Fay wished that she could have been wed with all the people she knew and loved – even her father – around her. Noticing her sadness, Max did his best to amuse them by telling them anecdotes about his time on the farms. Janet took this up and had them smiling about some of the awful kitchen maids she had had to put up with. Determinedly shaking off his despair at giving Fay such a drab wedding day, Henry told them something of his time as orra loon at Craigdownie and the bride surprised them all with quite humorous descriptions of awkward customers she had served in the pharmacy and some of the daft things they asked for.

  ‘Old Mrs Robbie used to come in for a “sleepin’ poother” for her cat because it kept her awake all night with its yowling. And wee Billy Fraser once asked me to make up a black-sugar-ellie bottle to look like the awful cough mixture his mother bought for him. I didn’t know that black-sugar-ellie was liquorice and water shaken together and left standing for days so I just gave him his usual mixture and told him it would do him more good than black-sugar-ellie – whatever that was.’

  The whole party was in a more festive frame of mind when the meal was over so Max suggested that they had a look round the city for an hour or so before they got the train back to Corrieben. Having once spent a week’s holiday in Aberdeen with an old aunt, Fay guided them down Constitution Street to the beach. The sun was at its height now and it seemed the right thing to do to take off their footwear and skip along the sands at the edge of the sea, the ladies draping their long skirts over their arms in case they got wet. They were all laughing breathlessly when they reached the estuary of the River Don and sat down on the grass to make themselves presentable for the next part of their expedition – up King Street, long and straight, lined with tall tenements of glistening silver granite. Janet was fascinated by the bustle in the shops on the ground level and would have tarried a while out of curiosity if Max had not hustled her on.

  King Street came to an end at the Castlegate, their starting point, but the Town House clock told them that there was still almost an hour before they had to catch the train back – time to have a quick look at the big stores in Union Street.

  When Janet noticed that Fay was looking wistfully at a lovely display of wedding gowns in one impressive window, she whispered, ‘Your wedding was just as legal and binding in a plain navy skirt and jacket as it would have been in one of them.’

  ‘I know but it would have been nice.’ Fay didn’t linger on the subject, however, she was too happy.

  All four dozed off on the train – even Max, usually full of energy, had difficulty in keeping his eyes open while he was driving the trap from Corrieben back to The Sycamores.

  Innes Ledingham welcomed them home, shaking hands with ‘Mr and Mrs Rae’ amid much laughter and wishing them good fortune. ‘I have had everything made ready for you,’ he murmured to Henry when he had a chance. ‘I have put in a small chest for Fay to keep her underclothes and that sort of thing but there should be room in the closet for her skirts et cetera. It will be a tight squeeze for two of you in that room but I am sure you will not object to that? Heh, heh.’

  The small chuckle greatly embarrassed Henry. If only he could have taken Fay off somewhere, even for this one night, their wedding night, it wouldn’t be so bad but how could they be comfortable with each other when everybody would know what they were doing?

  He need not have worried. He and Fay were so exhausted by the time they got to bed that the marriage was not consummated that first night.

  The newlyweds went to Drymill the next forenoon and, when they related the events of the previous day, Catherine felt angry that her husband had deprived his daughter of a decent wedding. She was glad to see, when she looked at him, that he knew what she was thinking and that his eyes were pleading for her forgiveness.

  As she had known, Henry was not happy about Joseph’s offer of money but, with Fay’s help, she managed to persuade the young man that it was purely a wedding gift – there were no obligations and there was no shame in accepting it.

  The two men shook hands then and Catherine took her daughter in her arms as she had longed to do since they came in. ‘I never got the chance to tell you … what to expect,’ she whispered, ‘but you’ll have found out for yourself.’

  ‘Oh, Mother, don’t be so indelicate!’

  Catherine thought nothing of this. It was natural that the girl did not want to talk about what had no doubt come as quite a shock.

  ‘Mr Ledingham has given Henry the whole day off,’ Fay went on, ‘so w
e are going to Ardbirtle in the afternoon to let his sister know we’re married.’

  * * *

  A flustered Abby didn’t know what to do. She hadn’t been expecting visitors and her washing from the day before was still lying all over the place. Pogie kept telling her she was getting to be something of a slut – he was always teasing her so she never paid any heed – but seeing her kitchen through the eyes of this dainty, elegant girl made her vow inwardly to change her ways.

  ‘Don’t bother doing that for us,’ Fay laughed as her new sister-in-law scuttled about folding up napkins, baby clothes and even her husband’s drawers. ‘It must be difficult to keep a house tidy when you have a baby to look after.’

  ‘That’s what I keep telling Pogie,’ Abby gasped, breathless with the idea of having to entertain a person like this as much as from her own activity.

  Fay’s eyes had widened. ‘Pogie?’

  Henry made the explanation, adding, ‘He’s a funeral undertaker and I hope none of the families he undertakes for knows what his own family call him. It’s not really dignified, is it?’

  Fay laughed in delight. ‘It’s not but maybe it suits him.’

  When the man in question came in, however, she revised her opinion. Judging by Abby, she had pictured her husband as a short, tubby man, rather like Henry in a way, but he was over six feet and straight-backed, wearing a perfectly fitting tailcoat and a tall bowler hat. His boots were highly polished and the creases in his trousers were like knife-edges.

  Abby was making the introduction so Fay held out her hand and had it grabbed and pumped up and down enthusiastically. ‘My goodness, I’m really pleased to meet you,’ Pogie told her, his voice another shock – perhaps higher than usual in his excitement at discovering that he had a new sister-in-law.

  ‘And I’m very pleased to meet you,’ she smiled, looking into his keen grey eyes but noticing his bushy head of hair and equally bushy moustache, both mousy brown. ‘Apart from your clothes, you’re not what I imagined an undertaker to look like.’

  His exuberance disappeared like magic, his face seemed to lengthen and sober, his mouth was drawn in. His expression was entirely different from that of a minute before and, when he spoke, his tone was low and mellow. ‘I do my best to be a credit to my profession,’ he intoned softly, then burst out laughing at her amazement. ‘I am something of a chameleon,’ he giggled. ‘I can change my mood to suit the occasion.’

  ‘All right, then,’ Abby said sharply. ‘We’ll have no more of the seriousness.’ She turned to Fay. ‘He doesn’t often take his serious manners inside the house.’

  Pogie beamed at her fondly. ‘How can I be serious when I have a lovely wife, a lovely son and a lovely home, even it if can be like Paddy’s Market at times.’

  Fay couldn’t help liking him. An undertaker he may be, and probably one of the best, but he was full of fun and he obviously doted on his wife and child.

  At that moment, the baby, who had been sleeping peacefully in the cradle, gave a loud roar, at which Pogie hurried across and lifted him up. ‘A sore gut, is it?’ he asked, as the infant curled up as if in pain. ‘Let Father rub it.’ He held the child over his shoulder and rubbed his back gently until he gave a loud burp. ‘That’s the way, my fine fellow.’ He looked at his wife now. ‘Is it feeding time? See, I’ll turn your chair round for you, so the visitors can’t see you.’

  Abby stood up to take the baby and Pogie heaved the solid armchair up and swung it round to face the other way. ‘That’s it, then. Off you go.’

  Fay glanced at Henry, who had turned red at the thought of what his sister was doing, and realised with a shock that she, herself, wasn’t in the least embarrassed. In fact, she wished that she could watch how the infant suckled and even felt a tingling in her own breasts.

  Pogie kept the conversation going while his wife was thus occupied, asking Fay about herself, how had she met Henry, what her parents thought about the hasty wedding. This had Abby, listening to his every word, exclaim, ‘Oh, Pogie, you don’t ask things like that.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ Fay assured her. ‘I left home because Father was against us getting wed and I went back to The Sycamores with Henry. It was Mr Ledingham who arranged for us to go to Aberdeen the next morning to be married and, as it turned out, we needn’t have gone. Mother got my father to change his mind, so we could have had a proper wedding after all … if we’d waited.’

  Pogie nodded. ‘But won’t it be fun telling your children and grandchildren that you had to run away to be wed? That’s much more romantic than having arranged it weeks, even months, ahead, don’t you think?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ After giving it some thought, she laughed, ‘Of course it is and it was still as legal as being in a church.’

  ‘You don’t regret it, then?’ Henry asked, having worried about this.

  ‘Not for one second. Pogie’s right. It was far more romantic than being in a church.’ She turned to her new brother-in-law again. ‘That clerk was not very welcoming and the room was not at all inspiring but, yes, all in all, it was romantic and I’ll never forget it.’

  When the infant had finished feeding, Pogie took on the task of changing him, to let his wife talk to the callers. Not a natural conversationalist, Abby felt inadequate at first, merely answering their questions, but she was soon talking to Fay as if they were old friends. In fact, she felt so easy in her company that she turned to Henry and said, ‘You’ll be going to tell Father and Nessie, as well?’

  ‘No,’ he said at once. ‘I told you before, I’ll never go inside that house again.’

  To cover her gaffe, Abby jumped up. ‘You’ll take some dinner before you go back to The Sycamores?’

  While she got out the plates, Pogie offered his son to Fay who accepted him timidly. ‘I don’t know how to hold a baby,’ she mewed.

  ‘You’re doing fine,’ Pogie grinned. ‘He’ll let you know if you’re hurting him.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘We called him Clarence – that’s Pogie’s real name,’ Abby said over her shoulder as she stirred the pot of soup on the hob.

  As Henry watched his bride cooing over the little bundle, he was assailed by a strange new emotion. He had thought that Fay was all he would ever need but he really needed a proper family. They needed a son but he would let the suggestion come from her. She was hardly seventeen, a sheltered seventeen, and motherhood would be too much for her to cope with for years yet.

  The dishes had just been washed and laid away when someone else knocked at the door and walked in, halting when she saw that Abby and Pogie were not alone. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know you had visitors.’

  ‘It’s all right, Nessie.’ On his feet now, Pogie shepherded her in. ‘You know Henry, of course, and this is his bride, Fay. They were wed yesterday.’

  Her surprise quickly hidden, the woman walked across to Fay and shook her hand. ‘I’m very pleased to meet you, and congratulations, to the both of you.’

  ‘Nessie’s my father’s wife,’ Henry murmured, wishing that he was somewhere else.

  She smiled broadly. ‘You’ll have to come home wi’ me and tell him the good news yourself.’

  Fay jumped in before Henry could refuse. ‘That’s very kind of you, Nessie. We’ll be glad to, will we not, Henry?’

  It wasn’t actually anger at his wife that he felt at that moment. He just wondered if she was always going to take her own way. ‘Yes, thank you,’ he mumbled. ‘But we’ve got to get back so we can’t stay long.’

  On the way to Oak Cottage, Henry prayed that his wife would not ask his father about the name Tchouki. The man wouldn’t like to be reminded about his first wife’s infidelity.

  Thankfully, Fay did not touch on the subject. She was her natural amiable self and he could see that his father was bowled over by her.

  Eventually, Willie turned to him. ‘And how do you like working at The Sycamores?’

  ‘I like it fine,’ Henry said honestly, ‘but I’ll
need to look for a better paid job if I’m to keep a wife.’

  ‘We’ve plenty room here for you and your wife and as many bairns as you want to have,’ Willie said without consulting his own wife. ‘My hands are getting stiff wi’ the rheumatics so you could move in here and help me in the smiddy.’

  Henry had trouble believing this. Just a few years ago, his father had practically thrown him and his sister out yet now he was being invited back. ‘No, Father,’ he said, firmly. ‘I am not built to be a blacksmith and, in any case, I want to find a house for myself. It’s my responsibility to look after my wife and any family we have – not my father’s.’

  Nessie defused the delicate situation by putting her arm round his shoulder. ‘Of course he doesn’t want to move in wi’ us, Willie, for the same reason we sent him and Abby to their Gramma. They want to be on their own – just like we did.’

  His father’s knowing expression annoyed Henry but Fay said shyly, ‘It will be best for us. I have little experience of cooking or actual housework so I am bound to make mistakes and I would hate anyone to know. It’s very kind of you to offer, Mr Rae, but we cannot accept.’

  Her gracious manner was all that was needed and Willie put his arm round her. ‘Aye, I can see what you mean but you’ll be welcome here any time, mind that. And if you ever need anything …’

  ‘We’ll manage,’ Henry said brusquely, then, at Fay’s slight frown, he qualified it. ‘If we do need anything, I’ll know where to come. Thank you, Father. Well, we’d better be going. We’ve left the pony and trap at Abby’s.’

  Willie and Nessie both saw them out and they were aware of being watched as they walked smartly along the road. Less than five minutes later, Abby was telling Fay to come back any time and Pogie was asking Henry how the visit to Oak Cottage had gone. ‘Willie’s been a good father-in-law to me,’ he said earnestly. ‘I know Abby and you had a pretty rough time with him and Nessie for a while, but they have both mellowed. It is far better to be friends than to harbour grudges from years back.’ He bit his bottom lip and went on, ‘That goes for Fay’s father as well. He was thinking of his daughter’s welfare without considering her happiness. But that is also in the past, don’t forget.’