“Jessica? Where are you? Jessica? Bessie is starting and is in need of you!”

I was in the orchard watching Sarah working with the bees. I found her deliberate movements as unprotected she handled them with no problems and their complete acceptance of her manipulations very calming when my life was difficult. “I’m coming,” I shouted in reply. Bessie is one of my farm horses. She’s a bit nervous and this was her first foal. I was being shouted for because she would calm down and settle to the matter at hand if I were there. I was the major influence on the farm horses and I had enjoyed being such since I was a child of four. Bessie had to share Stalwart with the other mares, but still I envied her for having been able to have what she wanted when she needed him, even if it were only for a week or so, and that was why I’d been seeking some calm by watching Sarah working with the bees.

All went well. Bessie had a filly, and they’re both doing well, but back to the tale. I’m Jessica McKinnon and I’m nineteen. I have no siblings nor cousins and my parents are dead, so it looks like I’ll be the last McKinnon of the name. My mother died when I was a child from what none know. She just faded away, and I barely remember her. I have many photographs of her and despite having my father’s eyes one can tell I am definitely her daughter. My father who was a lot older than my mother died two years ago. His heart gave up on him when we were making the hay, which is what we are doing at the moment.

I live in the small rural community of Tevayal, which tales insist is a historic corruption of ‘The Vale’, but no one knows if that’s really true. Tevayal is in an isolated glacier sculpted U shaped hanging valley at about six thousand feet above sea level. The valley floor is almost flat across its two and a half miles of width and its eighteen miles of length slope gently down from the cwm at its head to the lake at its mouth, barely losing a hundred feet on its journey. Almost half of our community lives in the small central town of Millins, which is on both sides of the bridge that spans the river Millin before it runs into the Clearwater, a mere of about twenty thousand acres that almost cuts the valley off from the outside world. Millins is surrounded by widely dispersed farms all over the valley floor and the entire community has maybe some six thousand souls in all. The farms work the valley floor and the lower slopes around it all the year and the higher grazing on the surrounding mountains during the summer.

Once the snow has melted in the spring, first thing in the morning groups of older girls and boys take the goats and the sheep up the mountains to graze the alps. They return at going on eight in the evening. The children take it in turns, one weekday on the mountains and four weekdays in school. The children rotate their days and whoever gets Friday does the following Saturday and whoever gets Monday does the preceding Sunday. Because it is paid work that the children cherish, once children leave school they are no longer eligible, which is a powerful incentive for them not to leave school early. An alp is any small area that produces grass up on the mountains, some are only tiny, less than a stride across, others would be large enough to be made for hay, were they to be more accessible. Even the smallest alp has a name, and the children know them all by name. When a child is old enough to go with the others they learn all the names within their first season. I can still remember them all. That aspect of our lives is much like in the book ‘Heidi’ by Johanna Spyri.

Tevayal is not completely isolated. There is a road that runs down the length of the valley and on to Inglestown. The road starts at the Cwm Head farm yard where I farm at the northern end of the valley and goes down the east bank of the Millin to Millins where it crosses the river at the bridge over the mill dam before continuing alongside the west bank of the river. Eventually it skirts the west shore of the Clearwater as a single track road hard up against the mountain, with passing places built out over the mere, before continuing, past the left turning to Wendath, dropping sharply down a mile to the west of the Millin Force where the river cascades over the valley lip dropping several thousand feet into the much calmer river at its base. The road after its precipitous descent levels out some what into the larger valley that goes down into Inglestown which is our nearest centre of population. Inglestown is forty-five miles away from Millins and at an elevation of eight hundred feet.

The post comes in once a fortnight and is delivered to William, known to all as Willi, Greenstock’s general Grocery store by the incoming iron ore and coke waggon which takes the outgoing mail on its return with whatever outward bound goods are awaiting transport. Many Tevayals pick up their own mail, but Willi has a teenage daughter and son who deliver the rest riding and leading however many pack ponies are necessary. Willi pays them but it is considered proper to tip them for delivery. The only telephone in Tevayal is in Willi’s store. It was decided unanimously at a meeting in Millins town hall years ago, decades before I was born, not to have telephones elsewhere. Every few years that decision is put to the vote again and the decision still stands. We know about modern technology, but have heard what it has done to other remote communities. We like the way we live and are not prepared to risk destroying it for some dubious convenience that would end up with outsiders owning all our land and our way of life no more than a footnote in a history book like the Shakers, the Amish, the Mennonites, the Mormons to name but few. All of who perished as a result of outsiders gradually buying them up. We don’t have religion like they had but we have no intention of being treated with the contempt that finally saw them off. Here we make the laws and decide what is acceptable and what is not, and we intend it to stay that way.

Few people go to Inglestown often, for being so isolated Tevayal is virtually self sufficient if one includes what the traders bring in on their waggons. We see a trader maybe once a month, but several only bring supplies like steel for the smiths and iron ore and coke for the founders. One came once with craftsmen’s tools, and returned not having made a single sale. All the tools we use are custom made by our own tool smiths and handed down from parent to child, or master to journeyman. A Tevayal maker mark is recognised everywhere outside the vale and the tools made in Tevayal are of superior quality commanding a high price and many a trader visits purely to see what can be purchased. Many of our folk are involved in the making of tools and their handles. It is a valued source of income to our entire community, for the money eventually finds it way around to all who live here.

Occasionally one of the Tevayal fishing boats puts in at Wendath, a small town of eight or nine hundred souls on the far south side of the Clearwater, and brings goods back, but our boats are only small and can’t carry much. Wendath’s boats supply all the fish they require, so our fish can’t be sold there, and a load of fish to sell at Millins is worth more to our boats than any goods they could return with, so water trade is infrequent, though Cardin Fielding brought his wife Faye back with him some fifty-odd years since when he was in his early twenties. He still describes that as his best catch ever.

When livestock is taken to the mart at Inglestown for sale at the end of the year often young women and men wishing a wider choice of spouse go too, but they invariably return, with or without a potential husband or a wife. The trip takes twelve to fiveteen days in all. Usually given good weather and grazing it takes ten days to get there travelling slowly so the animals can graze and don’t lose condition, then a day or so at the market and overnight at Inglestown followed by a day or two’s hard ride uphill to return. The few who remain always return eventually, often with sad tales to tell of a way of life that they didn’t understand or want any part of. Violence, theft, dishonesty and the like are not a part of our way of life. We certainly don’t like every one in our community, but have found it ill advised to resort to such measures. The disapproval of others is a powerful disincentive for poor behaviour in Tevayal.

Tevayal is, we are told by outsiders, an unusual place in its tolerance of all. We have a church and Pastor Alfred Willis is a kind and considerate family man with a dozen children who is usually a dairy farmer other than for an hour or so on Sundays, lest that is when his honest and helpful opinions are required for someone in a difficult situation. Our brand of church revolves around our farming year and the focal point of our year is the harvest festival. Most of our special days are to do with farming, forestry or fishing one way or another, the saining of the fields, of the animals, of the pregnant, of the boats, the prayers for suitable weather, an accident free harvest and felling season and of course the thanks for the harvest. Our weddings are important to us and involve prayers that the bride may have many children and safe childbirth for them all. We have no sulphurous condemnations of anyone coming down from the pulpit, apart from anything else that would be considered to be bad manners.

We had an evangelist preacher arrive here four summers ago. He railed, accused and threatened us with all sorts of dire consequences unless we took him to be our shepherd from the Millins town hall steps on his first day. That was a silly thing to do before arranging accommodation. We have no hotel, but even had we he would not have been given a room. He slept out of the wind behind the mill for four nights before leaving thinner but no wiser. He was still threatening us with dire consequences when he set off to whencever it was he came, not having been offered shelter, food nor even water. He’d been treated with courtesy by older children and adults but the younger children had laught at him and chanted, ‘Burn, burn, burn,’ and other repetitions of his favourite words and phrases, as they followed him on his way back to the land of the Godly as he’d put it.

None bothered to tell them to stop, and I don’t think they’d had so much fun since the previous harvest festival party. He said he was a man of God, but Jacob the blacksmith summed up every one’s feelings on the matter when he said, “The children had the right of it. He may be a man of God, but his God is no damned God I want any part of.” It was noticed that Annabelle his wife didn’t pull him up for cursing. No one missed the man and he was forgotten even by the children within the week. Pastor Willis, who is of a forgiving nature merely said he was a much misguided man.

I’m told a peculiarity of we Tevayals is our insistence on finishing things before moving on to something else. An oft repeated phrase you will hear many times a day is ‘When all is complete’. It has far more significance than it sounds, and is used in many ways, including as a parting. For example, ‘I’ll see you on Thursday, Simon,’ may be followed by, ‘Aye, when all is complete.’ It can mean nothing and at the same time everything, a meaningless trite phrase used without thought that is at the same time a statement of belonging to a clearly defined group, of being one of us, a Tevayal. If nothing else, when someone who was an outsider uses it we know they have become a Tevayal.

I farm Cwm Head farm. McKinnons have farmed Cwm Head for eight generations and relatives farmed there before that for centuries untold. Cwm Head is four hundred and twenty-six acres of valley bottom at the back of the valley, that’s not including the forty-odd acre tarn which the farm records say Eliza my fourth great grandmother had stocked with the trout, perch and other fish for the table. My land backs up to the cwm at the valley head, hence its name, and I graze six or seven hundred acres of the lower slopes too steep for the plough and have long accepted rights to nigh on two thousand acres of forest for the wood, some of which is coppiced, which lies higher up than the grazing. The local girls and boys take my sheep and goats up the mountains earlier in the year than those lower down the valley because facing due south the sun melts the snow earlier. It’s a productive and prosperous farm and employs three dozen full time workers who live in the large farmhouse with their families.

The farm house is actually a series of linked buildings with verandas facing inwards, all built around a central courtyard which the living quarters, workshops, barns and stabling open onto. The courtyard is convenient for managing live stock, it’s where we shear sheep and geld calves. I have rooms at the back of the farm house and my veranda faces the gateway and the lower valley. Cwm Head also employs many more folk at hay making and harvest time who camp in the barns or in tents, but get fed in the huge hall which has the farmhouse kitchen at one end.

I have extensive fruit orchards, both trees and soft fruits and supply Millins with most of its fruit and nuts. The micro climate at Cwm Head seems to suit the fruit better than anywhere else in the valley. John and his daughter Sarah are the Cwm Head bee keepers. It’s a full time job and they manage a couple of hundred hives. During the cold weather they maintain equipment and prepare honey and mead for sale in Millins. The bees get an early start in the year from the early pollen from the catkins on the hazels in the wide hedges and the alders that surround the tarn. They have a long season with steady wild flower nectar supplies between the heavily productive fruit tree blossom early in the year, the linden tree and pasture flowers for the full summer and the heather on the mountains as the summer draws to a close.

During the winter and spring, Mary is a baker at her family’s bakehouse in Millins, but she arrives a couple of days before the hay making and the harvest gets underway to set all in motion for the feeding of what can often be a few hundred folk. Mary is a fixture, she’s been cooking for the hay making and harvest hands at Cwm Head every year since long before I was born. We keep a room in the house available for her.

After my father’s death, many of my neighbours were surprised and concerned that I decided to farm Cwm Head myself rather than appoint a manager. But as I told Pastor Willis, “I don’t know any other way of life, and my neighbours have all said if I need anything at all, help or advice, all I have to do is ask. I certainly don’t wish to move to Millins, and I couldn’t live here and watch someone else give the orders without resentment.”

For a long time I have been especially involved with the farm horses, huge but gentle animals that average twenty-two hands at the withers. Stalwart my stallion is a mane hair or two over twenty-five hands. Cwm Head breeds farm horses, and I currently have six mares in foal. Queenie, the grand old matriarch, is near her time, and she and I have a special relationship. She’s older than I, and, like Mary, has always been there in my memory. I wasn’t going to leave her foaling to the care of anyone else, but I’d have probably been laught at for that, so I’ve said nothing.

Alfred was correct in what he told me. “You need someone to share your life’s burdens with, Jessica. I do understand why you’ve never had a close friend, Child. Children can be very cruel to each other without meaning to be, but I, like many others, am concerned for you. If you can find no one here to suit you, be it a young man or a young woman, you should go with the livestock to Inglestown this year to look about you. A pretty girl like you should be able to find someone who would suit you quickly. Stay till you find someone willing to live here, and bring your intended to the church for your wedding, though I would ask for a bit of consideration for your neighbours. Use your weather sense to pick a day when the weather is kind, for there’ll be so many folk there I’ll have to marry you in the open air.”

I chuckled with Pastor Willis at that and promised I would be more diligent in my search for a life partner. His parting words unsettled me, but they were intended kindly and I considered him wise when he said. “If you find no one, then I suggest for your peace of mind you adopt at least two children to love and to care for whilst you are there before returning. If you do, once they have settled in tell me and I’ll publicly baptise them as Tevayals and McKinnons.” So may be I shan’t be the last McKinnon of the name after all.

Which brings us back to today and the hay making. I’m working with Joshua Fielding. Joshua’s family mostly fish on the Clearwater for the cooperative founded by his grandfather Cardin. They sell the fish at Millins, but they live at the lake shore near their boat sheds and workshops. Joshua doesn’t fish he keeps huge black pigs of the highest quality on a modest scale on his uncle Benjamin’s farm about six miles down the valley from Cwm Head. Benjamin, Joshua’s mother’s brother, is a dairy farmer who produces all his own hay and grows significant quantities of vegetables for sale. Joshua’s pigs have shelters available to them which they only use when the weather is appalling, for they prefer to be outside more or less permanently rooting in the woodland that is too rough for any purpose useful to Benjamin. May be fifteen years ago when he realised that nearly fifteen year old Joshua was looking about for something to do other than fishing he suggested pig keeping on his woodland saying, “It’ll clear the land, so I’ll be able to get a team of horses in there more easily when I want to fell a tree for gate stoops1 or the like. Give me the equivalent of a couple of decent sized pigs a year for rent, and that’ll do nephew.”

Joshua had spent time looking for quality breeding stock, and had bought a dozen sow piglets from a farmer three hundred miles north of Tevayal and a couple of unrelated young boars from a hundred miles north of where he bought the sows. The pigs were all of a hardy, large, black breed and they thrived in the better climate of Tevayal. After several generations of only breeding from the best by culling the poorest first for meat and cross breeding to a colossal black and white boar Joshua obtained from sixty miles south of Tevayal they were the biggest pigs anyone from Tevayal had ever seen. They were hardy and grew quickly on minimal feed other than what they rooted for themselves and even the boars were good tempered, which Joshua put down to handling them from birth every time he gave them their daily ration of milled feed. That he said was why he gave them the otherwise totally unnecessary feed. The carcasses had enough fat to make for good pork and bacon and sold well. After nearly fifteen years of raising pigs Joshua had done well for himself, but he couldn’t expand any further because the woodland on his uncle’s farm was carrying the maximum number of pigs the area could sustain. It was known he was seeking other similar land to rent so as to expand.

In the time when he is not dealing with his pigs Joshua works as a hedger with two of his distant relatives who work as permanently roving hedgers and ditchers. He is known by all as a hedger of the highest ability, for his laid hedges are completely stock proof. He maintains he has taught himself how to make them so because hedges are the only economic way to contain his pigs. He says he couldn’t make a living off them if he had to fence them in and a hedge has to be of the absolutely highest quality to prevent Percy his largest and most powerful boar from forcing his way through it. Percy is actually a gentle beast and will follow Joshua anywhere if he rattles a bucket with a handful of feed in it, but being a pig he is naturally inquisitive as to what opportunities lie on the other side of any barrier, and Josh says he has better things to do than rattling a bucket to return Percy or any of the others to where they should be. Pigs are intelligent and Percy is a genius by pig standards, but Joshua says that if a pig can’t see any light through a hedge they assume it is solid with nothing on the other side of it, so his hedges are laid at a minimum of four feet thick and branches are laid not just along the hedge row but some diagonally from side to side within it too.

It was rumoured several persons with woodland were exploring possibilities with him, but he was driving a hard bargain, for he was not prepared to accept their terms which involved he having the responsibility for the perimeter security of their woodland which would mean any damage his pigs did to their neighbours crops was his problem. Just a single pig on it’s own could do a lot of damage in even an hour in established crops and Joshua was unwilling. He’d been overheard to say to one woodland owner, in the Millins Dam, a popular public house in Millins next to the mill, that he’d accept the terms he was offered, if and only if the owner would pay him the usual rate for upgrading the hedges to his required standard. The man had objected and Joshua had replied, “I’ll leave it with you. No other offer is acceptable, so we only have a deal when all is complete. I’m not going to be responsible for the consequences of your inadequate hedging. If you improve the hedging to the required standard I’ll agree to a ten year deal. I decide what is adequate and the best way for you to ensure that is to engage me to do your hedging. That will give you seven years rent. If you refuse you make nothing for ten years.”

Josh will only lay hedges to the standard that keeps his pigs in and if necessary he plants additional thorns along the sides of the existing hedge. Most hedges in Tevayal are of quickthorn but Joshua’s are a half and half mix of quickthorn and blackthorn with the addition of wild roses and briars. They soon become impenetrable, but he offers no guarantees unless stock is not put into the field the hedge surrounds till it has started to green up and has no gaps livestock can see through. All our hedgers prepare and lay hedges the way Josh does now. One benefit of that is the ready availability of hazel nuts, wild apples for sauce and cidre, sloes, the fruit of the blackthorn, bramble berries for jam and wine, hips from the roses, haws from the quickthorn and rowan berries too for wine and brandy. Joshua is rightly a well respected and well regarded man.

But back to today, we work in pairs on the hay, one with a hay rake and one with a pike. Our hay rakes are lightly built and can only handle dried grass. The weight of green grass would break them. They have to be light to keep their weight down because they have wide heads, some are six feet across. Their wooden teeth are just a friction fit in the heads, but if one breaks or drops out you can soon whittle another from something out of a hedge and knock it in with a stone if there is nothing better available. The pikes, others call them pitch forks or hay forks, are used to break up heavy clumps of green grass that would damage the rake. Joshua is big and strong and prefers to use the pike rather than a flimsy and easily broken rake, which suits me as I like using the rake which is lighter work. Though I’m reasonably tall for a woman there’s not a lot of me and a pike tires me quickly. Most pairs alternate from time to time, but we stay with our tool of choice which is why I like working with him.

I like Joshua, he’s a widower just shy of thirty with four children, and I’d always liked Julia his wife who’d been an outsider. Julia had married Joshua when she was sixteen and had lived in Tevayal thereafter. She died from leukaemia just before my father died. She’d been to a big city hospital, but told me it hadn’t helped any and she thought they were just using her as a guinea pig. Against their advice and wishes she’d returned home to die with her family and friends around her. Joshua took her death badly, and it was only his brothers and sisters that had managed to keep his family together. For the best part of a year his children effectively had no father as well as no mother, but eventually he’d returned to face his responsibilities, and was now known to be looking around him for a wife and a mother for his children.

The horses had turned the bulk of the grass over before we’d started and we’d worked our way down our rows of what the horse drawn turner had left, turning and spreading it onto the dry ground at its sides between the windrows. We had a couple of hundred yards of our last rows to do, and the others were more or less level with us, when I asked, “You ready for some tea and a sandwich, Josh?”

Joshua nodded to the end of our rows, and, as I’d expected, said, “Aye, when all is complete.”

We finished our rows and joined the others at Mary’s waggon where she and her assistants were dipping mugs into milk churns full of tea and ice cold berry squash to pass round and distributing mountains of sandwiches of several descriptions, pasties and some of the last of last year’s apples.

Alice, my nearest neighbour, looked at the sun and remarked, “By the time we’ve eaten, given this breeze it’ll be dry enough for the horses to turn it again. Give it half an hour and we can follow up again. If the horses turn it at lunchtime tomorrow, Jessica, they’ll be able put two rows in one as soon as they’ve finished turning and we can start loading and leading it in by two. You got lucky with the weather. Mind, I reckon you always do. You have a knack of knowing when to mow, I’ll give you that. How do you do it?”

“Well, Alice, Dad always said some folk would only mow when the season was so far advanced they were forced to, but he always preferred to take his chance on having to dry off a bit of unseasonal rain rather than mow late and try to make hay when the dew was still on it till well into the afternoon. He always said you had to realise you couldn’t make hay with one end still fast to the ground.”

There was laughter at that and old Bob, one of the horse men said, “Aye. I mind Alec’s dad saying that many a time too. He must have been saying it time out of mind, probably got it from his dad. You keep it going, Jessica Girl, it’s part of your family’s history,” which caused even more laughter. Most remembered Alec, my dad, but few remembered Gabriel his dad who died years before I was born, and not even Bob, who was ninety-odd remembered Micah, Gabriel’s dad.

Before we finished eating, Bob got up and said, “I’m ready and the horses too. I’ll make a start, so when you’ve finished eating you can follow me up. Mary, leave me a mug of red tea for when I’ve done will you? I’ll be fine with it cold as long as there’s no milk in it.”

“I’ll put a couple of sandwiches by for you in between a couple of plates too, Robert.”

By the time we were done with the hay it was going on eight from the look of the louring sun and I suspected every one was as hungry as I. Mary had had a couple of Joshua’s pigs on the spits since long before day break which was when the bakers started. Bushel boxes of onions, turnips, potatoes, carrots and cabbages had been prepared by her assistants along with cauldrons of gravy and trays of the apple and chestnut stuffing usually used with pork and poultry. I was looking forward to eating. The rhubarb crumple with its crusty crumple topping, which contained rough crushed nuts and rolled unhulled oats, above the spiced and honey sweetened rhubarb would be served drowned in time thickened, yellow cream. The cream from the milking of several days before came from our small herd of Callseys, which were only kept to provide for the kitchens and board of Cwm Head, produced a relatively low yield of very high cream content milk that made wonderful butter.

The meal would be followed by a few glasses of the rich, nutty, brown ale made by Elisabeth who worked at Cwm Head full time and it would be a well earned reward to all. Elisabeth was in charge of our pantries and spent her time supervising the brewing, stilling and preserving which included making the best tasting bacon in the Vale. Her sausages, of which she made several types, were always the talk of the vale and what little surplus she sent to market at Millins were always sold within an hour. George Elizabeth’s husband was the Cwm Head farrier and blacksmith.

Mary was an expert at cooking for crowds and had a way with crackling pig skin to perfection. I’d always suspected her cooking was one of the reasons Cwm Head never had any trouble finding enough folk to help during busy times, no matter how many farms needed them. Mary always planned her cooking days ahead, one meal leading into the next and nothing was ever wasted, so like every one else, I knew what tomorrow’s sandwiches would contain and looked forward to those too. There is something about eating a roast pork and stuffing sandwich with fruited cheese and a glass of chilled cidre in the open under a hot sun that makes one feel that all is well with the world. The geese for tomorrow eve’s meal had been plucked and prepared two days since, and I knew the lambs for the day after had been slaughtered this morning. To Mary organisation was the key, and most of her assistants had been working with her for so long they didn’t need telling what to do.

When we reached the end of our rows I said, “I’m leaving my rake here, Josh. Alice was probably right, but I’ll be peeved if I have to walk back to the barn for it if she’s not and we get a heavy dew.”

“You’re right. I’ll leave this with it too, till all is complete.” As we propped our tools up against the hedge, I noticed most of the others had done the same too before turning to walk to the farm house. The few that hadn’t changed their minds quickly and did likewise. Then out of nowhere Josh asked me, “Jessica, would you do me the honour of wearing my posy at the harvest festival dance?”

I was stunned. We’d been talking about tomorrow’s weather and making hay and then he hit me with that. An invitation to go as a partner to the dance was one thing, but a request to wear a man’s posy at the dance was a proposal of marriage. A girl wearing it pinned over her right breast indicated to all that his proposal of marriage had been accepted. I’d been considering all the single men near my age that I knew, and had reluctantly concluded Pastor Willis was right, I’d have to seek farther afield. I’d never considered Joshua because of our age difference. If he were interested in me I knew I was interested in him, for he was a decent man with a proven record as a good husband and father, and he had four children who needed a mother, yet I hesitated, for nothing was as simple as it seemed. Though all my neighbours knew about my fits as a child, Pastor Willis was one of the few who knew much more, though none knew the entire story. Most folk knew that when I was little my problems had made me subject to what were first thought to be temper tantrums. It was when they triggered the fits that Dad had been advised by Doctor Greensmith to take me to the city hospital.

The hospital doctors had prescribed medication and had advised my parents on how to rear me to prevent any recurrence of my fits which they maintained were due to a rare but well understood condition. That had obviously worked, for I’d had no more fits, but when I reached thirteen it was obvious that I was not growing and developing as I should. After several visits to a number of different city doctors, some of who seemed to be more interested in how my thinking affected my growth rather than in my growth itself, the chief hospital doctor changed my medication. After a series of injections to boost my growth I was prescribed further medication and told I would need to be treated in hospital when I had stopped growing which they thought would be when I reached seventeen, but they would prefer to leave it another two years after that to be on the safe side. They had said it was unlikely that I would grow to more than five feet which was acceptable to me at the time. As a result I’d been taking medications since the age of four, and visiting the hospital at least four times a year since the age of thirteen. I can’t remember not taking tablets, but I now looked like a normally developed young woman of my age and I was five feet eight inches tall which was much better to me than five feet nothing. I’d always worried that my condition would cause me to be plain, but I had ended up looking like the photographs of my mother who was pretty which had relieved me greatly.

Despite looking like my mother, I’d never had any close friends of my own age and had always believed all the Tevayal children had not wanted to be too close to me in case my problems were contagious, like the mental equivalent of ringworm, cooties or some dreaded lurgy. Of more concern to me since the age of twelve, I’d never got anywhere near within kissing distance of a boy. Since my father’s death some young men had been expressing interest in me, but I knew they were all very much more interested in the McKinnon of Cwm Head than they were in Jessica McKinnon. Despite having no fears that Joshua was like those others, my heart lurched at Joshua’s request and my head was in turmoil turning over all that lay in my near future. However, matters were coming to a closure, for I had hospital appointments in the city after this year’s harvest was in. I would be there a month, possibly six weeks. I’d been told that when I left hospital all would have been resolved and though I would need to keep taking some medications it would be far less that what I was currently taking. I would also have to do physiotherapy exercises to remain healthy.

It felt like forever before I replied, but it could only have been a few seconds. “Josh—”

“I’m not trying to press you, Jessica. You don’t have to give me an answer now, nor any time soon. That’s why I asked you now, to give you plenty of time. I’ll be honest. I need a wife. My children need a mother. I have always liked you, and would come to love you quickly if you said yes. All say you are pretty, but I disagree, for to me you are beautiful.” At that a cloud of fearful doubt blew across his face and he almost ashamedly asked, “There’s no one else is there? If there is you have my apologies and I’ll never mention it again.”

Josh was clearly embarrassed but determined to plead his case and to be totally proper about it whilst he did so. Total honesty was required of me, anything less would have been inappropriate and have lessened me in my own eyes. “No, Joshua. There is no one else, and yes I do want a life partner, but it is not as simple a matter as it may appear. I have medical problems, you’ll have heard about that?”

“Yes. I know you take medicine for fits, but all say you have not had a fit for years. Felicity Underfell, has them weekly, yet she is a good mother and wife to Bill. I should be more than accepting of whatever circumstance that gave us.”

“It’s not just that, Joshua. After the harvest I have to go to the city for hospital treatment. I’ll be there a month, maybe a month and a half, but all will be fine when I return, though I shall still have to take some tablets. My problems are such that I’ll never be able to have children, which is one reason why you are attractive to me as a life partner. So I have to ask, do you want more children?”

“Not as much as I want a mother for the children I already have. If you want more to continue your name we could adopt from Inglestown. I don’t understand how, but there are always unwanted children there which is very wrong, but it may be a solution to your need. Or …,” Joshua hesitated before continuing, “I could take your name. I’d rather farm than fish, but I shan’t inherit anything from my uncle. My five younger cousins all have a better claim than I, so I’d be giving up nothing. That way all our children would carry your name. I’m sorry if that seems presumptuous, but I just want you to understand how serious I am about wishing to marry you.” Deep in thought Jessica said nothing, and eventually Joshua continued to ask, “Is your treatment dangerous? You sounded nervous, almost frightened.”

“No. It’s not dangerous, but recovering from the surgery will be painful and involve a lot of bruising, but it will correct my problems. An additional benefit of the surgery is that the medication to maintain my health will be different and I shan’t have to take as much as I currently have to. However, the surgery does have a cost, for I shall need daily physiotherapy as a result of it. It’ll be early December at the earliest before I return, it may be as late as just before the Sun Return.2 Are you willing to wait that long for me?”

Joshua wasn’t giving up easily, “You’ll wear my posy to the dance if I’ll wait?”

It was to my surprise I replied with no reluctance at all, “Yes. I’ll wear your posy if you’ll wait.”

“Will you walk out with me holding hands in the meantime? So others can see you are mine. I have always liked you, and you are beautiful and very desirable. I know others are intending to ask you, so if you had declared for me I should be much easier in my mind and free of the fear of losing you to someone with more to offer whilst you were away. I know that I’m not much of a catch to the McKinnon of Cwm Head, for all I own is a hundred and twenty good quality pigs which although they earn me a decent living do not make me a wealthy man. Certainly my wealth can’t be compared with yours, but unlike some others it’s you I want, Jessica McKinnon, not the McKinnon of Cwm Head.”

That was sweet of him to tell me that. Most men I knew would never confess to insecurity like that. “I wasn’t looking for wealth, just someone who cared and who would rear a family with me.” I smiled and added, “Elizabeth’s best bacon and pork products are all made from your pigs, and we’ll be eating two of your pigs off the spits as well as the makings from everything else not on the spits tonight, so perhaps it would be foolish of me to say no to you. But being serious, Joshua, Yes. Yes I will wear your posy to the dance and I will hold your hand in public. I am aware of the machinations of those others you spoke of and of their intentions and desires. A few have already asked, but I have no interest in any of them. I have always respected and liked you, and it would never occur to me that you would be cynical enough to offer for me for any reason other than that you wished to marry me. In any event, having declared for anyone I’d never sell myself to a higher bidder.” Jessica hesitated before adding, “Like you, I should come to love you quickly too, though I suspect I am already beginning so to do.”

“I’m sorry for the insult, it was not intended, it was just my fears speaking. I am grateful for your words concerning me. May I kiss you now?”

“I know, and I wasn’t insulted. As to the kiss. Yes. I’d like that.”

Now that was enjoyable. The nicest event in my whole life, and Joshua was gentle and typically Tevayal at the same time. “So you’ll marry me when all is complete then?”

I didn’t answer him immediately, but reached for his hand as we walked back for a wash and dinner, and basked in the approval of my neighbours who typically would say nothing to us for at least a week. When a couple started a relationship it was known things could be awkward for a while and not helped by any remark on it, be it considered however innocuous. Such was considered to be bad manners and not proper behaviour for a Tevayal.

As Josh smiled at me I was thinking of our future and what I could do to ease his obvious distress at our difference in wealth. It occurred to me that at the end of this year I could hire some hedgers to work under Joshua to hedge my oak woodland and start building some additional weather proof cover in the shelter of the trees ready for young pigs in late spring or early summer next year when the hedges would be thickening and adequate to contain young pigs. The acorns would ensure tasty bacon, and my woodland could carry maybe a thousand pigs if they were fed a decent ration from our own cereals. If he wished to continue keeping pigs at his uncle’s farm too, with the extra feed we could provide he could easily keep twelve hundred pigs. Selling the meat in Millins would be no problem, folk were always complaining there was never enough meat available. It looked like Elizabeth would need a couple of assistants or apprentices to make bacon and ham, and maybe Cwm Head needed to employ a full time butcher eventually. I realised after those thoughts that I had already committed myself to a future with Joshua, and the only thing that bothered me was that maybe his children would have difficulty accepting me as their mother due to my lack of age. I was excited by and extremely nervous too at the prospect of motherhood.

It’s strange what sometimes can flit across one’s mind. I realised I would no longer be envious of my mares, they had Stalwart and I would have Joshua who as my husband would be providing me with the necessary physiotherapy. Even Pastor Willis wasn’t aware that the fits of years ago were in fact induced by the temper tantrums of a little girl desperate to be treated as a little girl and not as a little boy. It was my parents’ acceptance of me as I was, not any medication that controlled the fits. The medications ensured I grew to be a young woman, and before the Sun Return celebrations all would be complete.

I smiled as my thoughts shifted back to answer Joshua in typically Tevayal fashion, “Yes, Joshua McKinnon of Cwm Head, I’ll marry you and be mother to our children when all is complete.”

1 Gate stoops, gate posts.
2 The Sun Return, the shortest day.