Mathew's Tale (3 page)

Sadly, I am advised by the regimental surgeon that Corporal Fleming’s wound has proved insurmountable. I knew your son personally, and admired him, so be assured that I grieve with you in your loss. It may be small consolation, but you should know that his sacrifice has not been in vain and that his nation will be forever in his debt, and of course in yours.

I am, madam,

Yours faithfully,

Victor Feather, Captain.

Mathew stared at the paper, incredulous, as he took in its contents.

‘Captain Feather,’ he murmured. ‘What did you do, you amiable idiot?’

Oh yes, he knew the captain, a young man, no older than himself but from a very different background, the fourth son of a baron and a pupil of some English school called Harrow, of which he was always scathing.

Captain Feather had been popular with his troops, because he was a friendly fellow with no airs and very few graces, and also because he was one of those officers who listened to his sergeants and corporals, and who recognised that they knew at least as much as he did, nay, undoubtedly more, about the business of front-line fighting.

Mathew thought back to the long and terrible day, the climax of the Waterloo campaign. Yes, he had seen Feather, brandishing his sword and urging his men to hold firm as Napoleon’s agile and rightly feared Voltigeurs raced towards them.

Then, a very little time later, in the confrontation that still disfigured his dreams, he had been wounded and out of the battle. Apparently out of life too, it seemed, according to his commander’s letter.

It came to him that he had never seen the captain again after the field of Waterloo. A few days after the battle, he had been told, Feather had been appointed to Wellington’s personal staff, plucked instantly from the line. The letter to his mother must have been written in haste indeed, a fine thing for the lad to do, Mathew conceded, even if the news he sent had been wrong . . . understandable but tragically wrong.

He cast his mind back three years to the hazy moments when he had begun to emerge from a period of which he could remember nothing but darkness and pain, sometimes severe but often reduced to a dull ache by the administration of something that he learned later was called laudanum.

‘You’re a hardy man, Corporal Fleming. I’ve known very few men to suffer a wound like that and live.’

Those were the first words he could recall during his slow awakening, uttered by the regimental surgeon as he stood, looking down upon him in his wood and canvas bed.

‘Are you telling me I’m not dead, sir?’ he had croaked, drawing a laugh.

‘Can you feel anything?’

‘A sore belly.’ He had grimaced as he spoke.

‘Then consider yourself lucky. The dead feel nothing.’

‘What happened?’

‘You were wounded, nearly four weeks ago, in the battle they’re calling Waterloo. You’re a hero, man, you and those that weren’t as lucky as you. We’ve seen the Corsican off for good this time.’

As soon as he had spoken, Mathew remembered: the French infantry rush, the bodies falling under musket fire, the survivors engaging at close quarters, and that wee leaping bastard, rushing on to his bayonet yet twisting at the stroke and . . .

‘You were ripped open,’ the surgeon had explained, graphically. ‘The blade got into your liver. All I could do was stitch you up, feed you opiates, and wait for you to die. I told your captain as much. And yet you didn’t; you must be made of leather yourself, saddler.’

‘There now,’ he whispered as he stared at the letter. Indeed, Feather had been told he was as good as dead; he had known that, yet he had forgotten. The stuff they had given him had muddled his mind.

They gave him more after that, more than perhaps he had needed, for he had developed a craving for the drug, and had claimed to be still in pain for many days after it had gone for good, until the surgeon had seen through him and sent him back to the regiment, with a note to the colonel that his duties should be light.

And so they had been, until they had ended altogether with his second wounding.

He was still absorbing the shock when John Barclay returned from the Fisher baptism. He stood in the doorway that led to the hall, and to the manse’s reception rooms.

‘Mathew,’ he said, quietly, ‘I want you to come with me. There’s someone in the parlour who’ll not believe me until she sees you for herself.’

As he stood, he realised that his heart was pounding, as if he had been thrust back into battle and the French were charging. He took a deep breath and followed the minister across the hall.

Barclay paused at a door on the right, opened it and then stood aside. ‘Go on,’ he insisted. ‘This should be a private moment.’

Chapter Three

H
ANNAH FLEMING WAS A
stoic, born and raised. At some point in her childhood, when she had complained about the want of possessions that other village children enjoyed, her Presbyterian father had told her sternly, ‘That which Fortune has not given, she cannot take away.’

Mathew Russell was quoting his own grandfather, or so he told her, never having heard of Seneca the Younger. Whatever the source, Hannah carried the message with her into adulthood, repressing her feelings with a degree of ruthlessness, and enduring everything that life threw at her.

She was brought up on farm labourer’s wages in a village called Overtown. There was no parish school and so she grew up illiterate, as her parents had been, doing light work on the farm until she was apprenticed as a seamstress at the age of twelve.

Her father had been a friend of a man named Walter Fleming, the grieve in the farm where he worked. The Fleming family were better off than the Russells, and they had four sons, a mirror for Hannah and her three sisters. One of them was a young man with prospects; he was an apprentice saddler and could look forward to a good living as a tradesman, since that skill was in short supply in rural Lanarkshire. His name was Robert, and he and Hannah were more or less forced into an acquaintance by their respective parents.

She was indifferent to him, but she had been taught to believe in Fate, and so she accepted that he was hers. They were married when Hannah turned twenty-one, and moved to Carluke, almost a metropolis by comparison with Overtown, where the local landowner had promised there would be enough work to give them a decent living.

He was as good as his word, and Robert prospered, for all his developing fondness for male company in the alehouse. Hannah minded this not at all, as it allowed her to take on part-time work in her own trade and, in addition, freed her of his company for some of the time.

Five childless years went by, and Hannah had begun to think that she was barren, when she fell pregnant. She was no more excited by that prospect than by anything else in her life . . . until her son was born. When the midwife placed the squalling, wriggling, newly washed bundle in her arms, Hannah stared at him and made a great discovery, one that had passed her by for all of her twenty-seven years: love.

Her feelings for the child were so overwhelming that she thought her heart would burst.

And yet they were hers and hers alone, not to be shared with her husband or anyone else. To the rest of the world, she remained impervious to emotion, but when she was alone with her Mathew her eyes shone in a way no one could have imagined.

At first Robert had argued over her choice of name, wanting his son to be named Walter, after his own father, but she had told him, ‘When you give birth, my man, you can give the name as well, but until then . . .’

She had hoped for more offspring, but when it became obvious to her that Mathew was to be her only child, she had no difficulty in coming to terms with that situation. She focused all her attention on him, making the boy her life’s work. Nevertheless, she instilled in him a deep respect for his father (she was fond of Robert, who was a kind man in spite of his tendency to enjoy a tipple), making him understand that there was one head of their household and it was he.

She was determined also that the boy would grow up literate, and numerate. Her own lack of letters bothered her not at all, for she knew everything that she felt she needed or wanted to know. However she realised that the world was changing and that it was important for the new generation to have access to books, and news journals, even though very few of those found their way to Carluke. She was encouraged in this by the new parish minister, John Barclay, who had come to the charge to replace the Reverend W. G. Howitt, a man so grim and forbidding that none of his parishioners had ever plucked up the courage to ask what his Christian names actually were.

Where Howitt’s sermons were rooted in the spirit of John Knox, Barclay brought a new enlightened view to the parish, and worshippers filled his church by their own choice rather than out of duty or fear. He spoke of a new world, and of things that were happening in it, of Napoleon Bonaparte, of the Prince Regent, of the fledgling United States of America; he was an educator as much as an evangelist and Hannah knew that she should raise her son in his image as far as she could.

She came to know his housekeeper also. The two women were two generations apart in years, but similar in nature, and so they forged an understanding, if not a close friendship. It was sound enough for Jessie to tell her, and her alone, of her true relationship with the minister. She was in fact his maternal grandmother, her daughter having married very young, to a merchant from Stirling. She had died giving birth to John and his father had left it to Jessie to bring him up, living only just long enough himself to see him off to theological college.

She knew of the rumour, of course. ‘If people want to prattle, mistress, let them,’ she instructed Hannah. ‘They’ve little enough to fill their lives so let them find amusement where they may.’

The other pillar of Hannah Fleming’s life, and of her son’s, was George Porteous, the schoolmaster. Old Howitt had done double duty as dominie as well as minister, but when Barclay arrived following his death, he persuaded, nay instructed, the kirk elders that education was too important to be entrusted to a layman.

Porteous was appointed on his recommendation; the two men had met at university and were of the same generation. With his arrival, the village school became a place of enlightenment; he did not believe in beating children into learning, and asked only that his pupils do their best. ‘If they do not,’ he told Hannah when she enrolled Mathew, ‘they are punishing themselves, so there would be no point in my adding to their pain.’

Under his tutelage, every child in the village and in the area around learned to read, write and count, and by the time that Mathew reached his teenage years, Carluke had more literate and numerate children than it had adults.

Through those years Hannah watched her son grow with huge pleasure, but kept it to herself, admitting only to quiet satisfaction when he won the school’s dux medal at the age of twelve, even though the dominie pronounced him to be the ablest pupil he ever had.

It was then that she was guilty of the only selfish act of her life. Both the minister and the dominie were keen that Mathew should progress to Lanark Grammar School, a 600-year-old institution that was held up proudly as one of the finest in Scotland. Its alumni included General William Roy, and Robert McQueen, who had gone on to become the notorious judge, Lord Braxfield, but Hannah refused point-blank, her stoicism never more evident.

‘It’s ower faur for the laddie tae go,’ she declared. ‘Asides, we a’ have our place on God’s earth and Mathew has his. It’s no’ for him or us tae put on airs and graces, but tae be content with the station into which we’re born. He’ll be apprenticed to his faither and that’s an end o’ it.’

George Porteous was furious. He went directly to Robert Fleming and asked him to overrule his wife. The saddler simply looked at him as if he was mad and shook his head. John Barclay did nothing. By that time he knew that nothing could dent her obduracy. Instead he and Porteous made a secret pact to continue the boy’s education between them, as best they could.

But the fact was that Hannah’s pronouncement was a sham. Distance was no issue; the school was little more than five miles from Carluke, the boy was strong and well-shod and on days of foul weather, the minister had offered to take him there and back in his small carriage. Nor did she object to personal aspirations, for she had bettered herself by her marriage to Robert.

The simple truth was that Hannah could not bear to be parted from her boy, not ever. Her husband, while stolid, was no fool, and knew that perfectly well, but he was happy with the prospect of his son as apprentice, and so as soon as his age allowed, Mathew was formally indentured, as required by law, for seven years.

That time, or most of it, passed peacefully. News of the wider world and the wars against the French made its way to Carluke as it did to everywhere else, but with no talk of invasion it meant little or nothing to the rural community.

Until the time when everything changed and Hannah’s world was shattered.

Mathew had been a good apprentice, and his father a good teacher. By the time he had turned eighteen, he had learned all aspects of leatherwork. He could make a saddle that was just as fine as any his father had ever fashioned, and the boots and shoes that he was allowed to make for his mother were, she insisted, a more comfortable fit than his. The day was fast approaching when the sign over the workshop that read ‘Robert Fleming, saddler’ would be changed to ‘Robert Fleming & Son’.

The other side of his life was settled too. He and young Lizzie Marshall, the daughter of a neighbour family, were within two months of each other in age; they had been through school together, and Sunday school too. She was a pretty girl, with many an eye cast upon her, but hers were only for Mathew. There was an understanding between them, of which Robert and Hannah approved heartily, even if Sadie Marshall, the girl’s mother, had fanciful ideas that her daughter might marry ‘a professional gentleman’ rather than an artisan, whatever his skills.

Mathew was less than six months short of becoming a tradesman when his father died in his sleep.

While Hannah mourned her kind-hearted husband, quite genuinely, he had been gone for no more than a day before her focus turned to the future.

Two days after Robert’s funeral she called on Sir George Cleland’s factor, a Borders man named Philip Armitage. She said that she intended to employ a time-served tradesman, Hugh Hinshelwood from Lanark, to supervise the completion of her son’s indentureship, and trusted that work would continue to come from the estate.

But Armitage had moved fast. He had allowed no period of grace.

‘I am sorry, Mistress Fleming,’ he told her abruptly, ‘but I have already employed Mr Hinshelwood myself, on Sir George’s behalf, on a full-time basis. Henceforth he will undertake all of our saddlery work, and that of the tenant farmers.’

In that instant, three-quarters of the business of what would have been Robert Fleming & Son had vanished. Then Armitage twisted the knife.

‘Of course,’ he continued, ‘Hinshelwood will require somewhere to work. You will be aware that the premises that your late husband used were rented from the Cleland estate. I sympathise with your situation, but I am afraid that I will require vacant possession, forthwith.’

‘Can he do that, Mother?’ Mathew asked when she told him.

‘Aye, son, that he can,’ she replied. ‘He’s the factor; he can do anything he pleases.’

‘Then I’ll put him out of business;’ he declared, hotly. ‘I have faither’s tools and his skills. This cheil might have the estate work, but he’ll hae none o’ the rest. Time served or not, I’ll set up as a bootmaker and cobbler. I ken all the tenants; they’ll come to me, and once I have care o’ their feet I’ll tak’ the rest in time.’

‘And where will you work from, son?’

‘From the cottage.’

She shook her head. ‘The Cleland Estate is our landlord. Armitage’ll no’ have you takin’ Hinshelwood’s business. We’ll be on the street as fast as we’re oot the workshop. Mak’ yer shoes, if ye can, but mak’ no disturbance.’

‘Has faither left any money?’ the boy asked.

‘Now the funeral’s paid, there is fourteen pound and six shillings. A wee bit tae be goin’ on with.’

She saw the alarm in her son’s eyes. ‘But our leather stock is low . . .’

‘Then we must do what we can,’ she replied. ‘I’ll ask Mr Barclay tae try tae find you a place where ye can finish yer time. In the meantime, I’m still the best seamstress in Carluke.’

The very next day, the Cameron Highlanders’ recruiters arrived in the village. The day after that Hannah’s wealth had increased by five pounds, but her only son was gone.

And three years later, she received the fateful letter that told her he was dead.

The arrival of a mailbag was a regular occurence in Carluke; the practice was that it would be delivered to the village shop, which was owned by Sadie Marshall’s family, and its contents distributed from there, even those which were intended for the ancient Bernard Scott, the village’s only literate Roman Catholic, whose son was a seaman in the Royal Navy and a veteran of the great battle of Trafalgar.

Hannah had never received a letter directly; all of Mathew’s mail had been addressed to Lizzie, and its contents had been intended for them both. Therefore as soon as she had opened the cottage door in answer to John Barclay’s knock, and had seen what was in his hand, she had known what it would tell her. Sadie’s brother, Peter Wright, the shopkeeper, had guessed too, and rather than giving the letter to his niece, had entrusted it to the minister.

When Barclay read it to her, he was the one with tears in his eyes, not Hannah. She would shed hers in private, as she had done on many lamplit nights since her boy had gone.

‘Will they bring him hame?’ she asked, breaking the silence that had fallen when he had finished.

‘No,’ he answered, quietly.

‘They did for yon Lord Nelson,’ she observed, ‘or so I heard it said. Pickled in a barrel of brandy, he wis.’ She sighed, after that unique moment of bitterness. ‘But no’ for the likes of us, Meenister.’

‘There aren’t that many barrels in the world, Hannah,’ he sighed, ‘not for all that have fallen over the last ten years and more. The army looks after its own; its chaplain conducts many funerals.’

When she opened her door again, almost three years later, and saw Barclay standing on the step, she had no thought of déjà vu. A visit from the minister was not an everyday occurrence, but if he had something that needed doing or saying urgently, he was not one for summoning when he could walk a few yards himself. And yet, as she looked at him more closely, she saw that this was no ordinary call, that there was no tear in his vestments that needed repair. There was something about him that she did not recognise, until she looked more closely and saw an excitement in him that he could barely contain.