want your oilskin?’
‘Maybe.’
And he thought to himself that a man can’t do heavy work in an oilskin.
‘You’d be as well with a good fire for me coming hame.’
‘Are you to be working on the lime yourself, Tom? Can the men no’ see to that?’
His look silenced her. He reached for his pipe and filled it with a careless deliberation.
The child cried in the cradle. Mrs. Gibson undid the buttons of her dress and bared a scraggy breast that surprisingly held milk. Jean began to clear up the table …
Andy Frame, the boy, had a touch of the devil in him. Nothing depressed him, though there was much that might have depressed him. He was a hard enough worker but the joy of life was strong in him. He had a great fondness for the lassies and a great fondness for dance music. Tom Gibson solemnly prophesied that he would come to a bad end and that the lassies that had anything to do with him would come to a worse. But for the most part the lassies were willing enough to take that risk with Andy.
The boy was the life of Craigdaroch. An uncle had given him a melodeon and instructed him in the art of playing. Andy had taken to the playing as naturally as he had taken to the lassies. He could play reels and jigs and strathspeys with anybody in the Rhinns.
As his playing disturbed the many younger children in his father’s rackle of a house and as his father hated the sound of music at any time Andy’s favourite place for a tune was on the iron corn bin in the stable. He gobbled his dinner and was back in the stable with twenty minutes to spare for The Haymakers’ Jig or Strip the Willow.
He had paid little attention to the grieve’s instructions. To hell: he was always sharp at dinner time. Time enough to worry about work when it was yoking time.
Behind the merry notes there was a pleasant huskiness. The instrument was an ancient one and in need of repair.
The Willow was being stripped in fine style when Tom Gibson turned the corner of the stable. The notes, assisted by the rising wind, danced across the dung midden, gathering a fitting fragrance before they played upon the senses of Ned MacWhirrie, enjoying a pipe at his own fireside. The music blended well with his mood – a pleasant, harmonious exhalation, a fitting background to his wandering thoughts.
But they jarred on Tom Gibson. There was licence, there was defiance about them. Music was the essence of frivolity. Music did not blend with bare fields and incessant toil.
He kicked open the stable door and the notes were at his ears like a hive of wasps. The men put their pipes in their waistcoat pockets and slid off the bin. Andy thought he would finish his tune.
‘Stop that damned infernal noise, will ye?’
Andy’s fingers slackened on the keys. The grieve’s vehemence struck him like a blow. A pathetically discordant death-rattle sounded in the throat of the tune.
Ned MacWhirrie’s foot kept on beating. The tune echoed down the open corridors of his mind. Imperceptibly the doors closed on his mind. His teeth slackened and the pipe slid to the floor. His head sank over on his chest.
The iron shoes of the horses clattered on the stone paving round the stable door and a moment later were silent on the soft earthen court.
A few minutes later, in the first sudden squall of rain, eight carts jolted and juddered their way towards Craigdaroch Bay.
It was a race against time and tide. A race against the remorseless forces of nature. Water and wind cared nothing for the commands of Ned MacWhirrie of Craigdaroch. It was the energy of the grieve and the skipper against the incoming tide, the rising wind, the driving rain and the early oncoming darkness.
Both men knew what was demanded of them: they worked in brutal harmony. They did not spare their men: least of all did they spare themselves.
It was a bleak grey scene overcharged with tragedy. The headlands to right and left, Dumbreddan Point and Lagganmore, were hidden in sea-spume and driving rain. Sky and sea merged across the bay, obscure and indeterminate. The long waves surging on the shoulders of the incoming tide tore and rasped for a hold on the long shelving gravel beach.
Not a sea bird was to be seen or heard. Occasionally the cry of a whaup uncoiled itself with a melancholy despair.
At five o’clock, having given strict instructions to Jean, Agnes Gibson threw fresh peats on the fire and went out to the milking, making the door fast from the outside. The wind had risen to a storm and the rain was torrential.
Agnes Gibson hunched her narrow shoulders against the storm and ran towards the byre. She had watched the carts labouring into the court as long as there had been light and then as the light failed she had listened to the sound of the lumbering carts in an endeavour to estimate how the unloading of The Dolphin was proceeding. She was filled with forebodings of disaster that not even the activity of milking could dismiss.
Agnes Gibson was not a talkative woman: she had little time for gossiping. And she had the married woman’s dislike of the unmarried mother – or rather of the mother who continued to remain unmarried. She had little talk, therefore, for the majority of the milkers though she was always civil to them and they in turn reciprocated the civility with a respect that was not lacking in cunning: for they never knew the day they would require her services. In her errands of mercy and healing Agnes made no moral distinction although she may have been more sympathetic to the ‘deserving’ cases than the ‘undeserving’ ones. Moreover, as the grieve’s wife she could not allow herself the same degree of familiarity as the ploughmen’s wives.
Craigdaroch always appeared in the byre at milking time morning and night. Milk was his most important produce. He liked to keep a sharp eye on the milkers. He recognised how important it was to get every drop of milk from the cow. His theory, which he dunned into the heads of the milkers, was: it’s the last drop that pays. But Craigdaroch also knew that the health of the herd depended on good milking and he left nothing to chance.
He strode up and down the narrow passage between the stalls like a captain on a bridge. He was fully conscious that he was in command – and the milkers were equally conscious he was in command. They kept their cheeks or their foreheads to the cow’s flank and plied their fingers as ably as they knew. There were fifty cows down each side of the big byre: and ten milkers. It was a good milker who could milk her cow in six minutes. Craigdaroch did not allow more than ten.
But to-night he was worried about the lime cargo. As he paced up and down the byre, his hands deep in the cross pockets of his whipcord breeches, his ear was cocked to the storm. At intervals a powerful gust of wind would tear round the byre and the swinging oil lamps would flicker and dim.
And then his ear would catch the sound of a cart and he would pause in his step – that was another load home. They would manage if they kept to it. Ah, Tom Gibson was a splendid brute of a man: he would tear the muscles of his bones but he would get that cargo home. Aye: the like of Tom Gibson was not to be had for the picking up.
He stopped before Mrs. Gibson whose milking was quiet and efficient.
‘It’s a wild night, Mrs. Gibson.’
‘It is that, Mr. MacWhirrie.’
‘Aye…’
