Ten
There had been no snowfall yet this winter. Arabella wrapped her thick, woolen shawl around herself tightly. In the darkness, she walked the few yards between her small cottage and the slightly larger cottage that housed the school. She would light the turf fire in the large undivided schoolroom so that it might be warm if any girls braved the cold and dark to come. Then she would return to her own cottage for her breakfast. This far north, this early in the year, the sun would not rise until after half past eight.
Maggie Gunn, her only servant, told her that she, Miss Lovelock, should not be doing that. Maggie would tend to the fire in the schoolhouse.
“Your job, Maggie, is the cottage and me. My job is the school and my pupils. I have learned how to set and light the fire, and I will do just that.”
Maggie, a stout thirty-year-old woman, whose husband had died in the Napoleonic Wars as part of the 79th Regiment of the Foot, went back to stirring her pot of groats, shaking her head.
Arabella had been in the village of Dunburn for two years now.
When she had fled London, she had gone to Edinburgh first and then Glasgow, where she had decided to send the Middlewich carriage back to London. The coachman had begged her to tell him her plans.
“Your father will have my head,” he had said.
“He’s not my father. Tell him I will write to my sisters.”
She had laid some intentional misdirection for anyone who might follow her to Glasgow. A ticket bought in a conspicuous manner for a ship going to Liverpool, a main point of departure for ships going to America and Canada. Then she had ridden in an overcrowded mail coach from Glasgow to Inverness. She felt very lucky to have escaped with no insult to her person or her property. Finally, a privately hired coach farther north, up into the county of Caithness. The Highlands. Where Bailebrae lay.
She had told herself that it was a coincidence. That she was trying to go as far north as she could. To get as far away from London as she could. That she had gotten out of the coach with her two trunks because she had liked the look of the place and that she was tired of traveling.
She had chosen to settle—no, not in Bailebrae, the home village of a certain red-haired doctor—but in the larger village of Dunburn, nestled by the mouth of the river. But Bailebrae was not far away.
She had visited Bailebrae during her first weeks in the area. She had asked a few questions of some older residents of the poor village, hoping she did not betray the intensity of her interest.
Aye, there had been a quiet redheaded boy Alasdair Andrews from these parts, twenty years back, raised by his aunt and uncle, both long dead now. Nae, Alasdair had still been a boy when he had gone off to some city after the aunt and uncle had died—was it Edinburgh, do ye think?—and had not been back since.
That settled it. He had not been back in twenty years. This place had no hold on him. She would never see him here.
The little flame of longing that she had kept burning for a year and a half was then completely snuffed out. Completely. She put all thoughts of Alasdair Andrews aside.
Except she saw and heard him everywhere. In the red-haired girls who came to her school. In the green eyes. In the burrs. In the height of the men of the village, Highlanders all. He was all around her and, maddeningly, he was not there at all.
And now she had not seen him in over three and a half years and she could not really remember what he looked like. Not even a little bit, she told herself.
Her money was her own. That had been part of her father’s will. As long as she did not marry, she would be able to use it as she wished. And she had wished to use a part of it to make her school. The building of the school had already existed, the twin of the sandstone cottage she lived in. She had bought both cottages and the land they sat on, just outside Dunburn on the main road. She had had the downstairs of one cottage turned into a school room. And for the last year, it had been a school for girls.
Such a thing had never been heard of. Not in this part of the world.
Arabella had found a surprising ally in Boyd Cormack, the minister of the church in Dunburn. He had stood up to the elders of the church, saying that girls had as much need to read the word of God as boys.
“In fact, more,” he had said. “Are there not more women than men in the church on Sundays? Let the women know the texts themselves and they will bring His word into their own cottages. We will be the better for it.”
Arabella did not tell Mr. Cormack that her purpose was not to teach the girls to read the Bible. She wanted something more for them. But she didn’t know what it was.
At first, she had imagined the school as a place where she would teach the girls what she herself had learned from her governesses—reading, yes, but also reciting, writing in a pretty hand, French, geography and history, arithmetic, drawing, singing. There was no pianoforte to be had but it didn’t matter. Arabella had never had the skill of her sister Mary and would find it difficult now to play even a simple piece. And how would one teach a schoolroom of girls on one instrument?
But then Arabella had been faced with the question of what might the girls do with such knowledge? Geography and drawing? Useless unless they became governesses themselves. Perhaps. But who would hire Highland girls as governesses?
All her students spoke Gaelic, and most spoke some English. Since her Gaelic was rudimentary and she taught in English, very quickly all the girls became proficient in English. But in truth, she spent much of her time on hygiene and manners.
Because the girls were young, achingly young. Aged from four to ten. She wondered out loud to Maggie why there were none older. Maggie told her that the older girls needed to be of use in the cottages and farms.
Sometimes Arabella would see older girls passing on the road on market days, and she thought she saw some longing in their eyes when they looked at the school.
Yes, there was work on letters and numbers in the schoolroom. Some singing and drawing. Some attempt to bring a larger world to this small place, including stories from myths and history.
And then Mr. Cormack had stopped in her cottage one blustery spring afternoon and caught her with her needlework in front of the fire.
