Far Horizons
Far Horizons
Copyright ©2012 Katharine Swartz
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters and events portrayed in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Table of Contents:
CHAPTER ONE
Isle of Mull, 1819
The sea was calm tonight. Harriet Campbell stared across its flat grey surface and wondered how far
The Economy of Aberdeen
had travelled in one day. There wasn't much wind. Perhaps it was still close to shore, nestled among the green curves of the inner Hebrides, waiting for the wind to pick up and take her to the New World, the New Scotland.
Only that morning
The Economy
had set sail from Tobermory, on Harriet's home island of Mull, and it had taken her heart with it.
She sighed, and a slight breeze ruffled her bonnet strings. It wasn't as if the voyage had come as a surprise. The MacDougalls had been planning to emigrate for several years now. Harriet had known this day would come. What she hadn't known was what Allan would ask of her the day before he sailed.
“Care for one last stroll?” he'd said as he poked his head round the door of the Campbells' kitchen late yesterday morning. Harriet had been in the midst of the weekly ironing, and the kitchen was full of drying sheets, flapping like the sails of the ship Allan would be sailing on the very next day.
“Allan!” A warm rush of sweet sorrow swept over her. Whenever Allan had business on Mull, he made sure to stop at Achlic Farm, and that usually meant staying for tea as well as taking a walk with Harriet. She loved the times when they simply walked together in easy companionship, needing no words between them.
Since they were tiny children, she and Allan had been close. Kindred spirits, her mother used to say, formed at the cradle. The Campbell and MacDougall families had always enjoyed a close friendship, ever since Harriet's grandmother had married Allan's great-uncle. That made them kin, no matter how distant, yet a bond far dearer than that existed between Allan and Harriet.
She couldn't really remember a time without him. One of her first memories was when she was four years old, and lost out in the rain. They’d gone to a kirk meeting up on the hillside, since the first Riddell baronet wouldn’t build them a church, even though he owned nearly all the land from here to Fort William. The service had been long, and she had wandered away. She didn’t remember much, only that it had started to drizzle and she’d felt cold and frightened until Allan had found her, huddled among the rocks at Duart Castle. How she'd managed at that age to walk all that way, Harriet had no idea, but she could still remember the relief of seeing seven year old Allan, mixed with a childish pique that it had taken him so long to fetch her. She also remembered the reassuring warmth of his hand as he led her back home.
Although the MacDougalls lived on the mainland, they managed to visit Mull at least once a month, and each time Allan and Harriet remained by the other's side, as if they'd been stitched together.
“I'd think it strange,” Betty MacDougall, Allan's mother, had once said, “if it didn't seem so right.”
And it did feel right... they'd never run out of things to talk about, even when they were silent. They'd delighted in the same things, laughed at the same private jokes, shared the same dreams.
Over the years they’d exchanged letters, full of ideas and laughter, of distant hopes yet unrealised, yet never making mention of what Harriet now burned to know.
Did Allan love her? Love her, not as a sister or friend but a woman he wanted to spend his life with? She knew him like the back of her own hand or even her own heart, but she still didn’t know the answer to that question.
“Can you free yourself from all these sheets?” he asked, lifting up his hands in wry defense from the flapping cotton.
Harriet laughed, even though she could not quite rid herself of a certain wariness. She didn’t know if she could face a final farewell, not when so much she’d hoped for had been left unsaid.
“Get away with you.” Eleanor, Harriet's eleven year old sister, smiled and shook her head. “There's nothing here that can't wait. I'll make the pastry for tonight's pie, and you can have all the time in the world.” Her hazel eyes sparkled with kind mischief. “Or as much of it as you can before tomorrow’s sailing.”
Harriet nodded in acceptance. It would be rude and foolish to refuse Allan, and she knew she didn’t really want to. She wondered if she could refuse him anything.
Besides, farewells had to be said at some point, whether at the kitchen door or somewhere more private. “Thank you, Eleanor. You're a good lass, and a help to me.” Harriet patted her sister’s shoulder before taking Allan's arm and walking out into the sunshine.
It was a perfect summer's morning, breezy yet with the sun still warm on her face, a few cottony clouds scudding along the horizon’s. The air was scented with peat and heather and sunshine, and Harriet wondered if Allan would miss it when he left. The smell of home... the only home either of them had known.
Neither of them spoke for a few minutes as they walked along the rolling hills and meadows that stretched out from the Campbells’ farm in the center of Mull all the way to the eastern shore. David Campbell was one of the last small landowners in this part of Western Scotland; he owned two hundred acres of sheep pasture and he clung to it with tenacious pride.
Allan and Harriet followed the tumbled rocks of a dry stone wall until they reached the old ruins of Duart Castle. A little over a hundred years ago the castle had been the magnificent stronghold of the clan Maclean, and then afterwards an army garrison. Now it lay abandoned, grass growing in the main hall, the roof gaping with holes and the walls crumbled.
With an icy pang of dread, Harriet wondered if her own dreams were likely to follow a similar path. At this moment, with Allan having never said a word to her about his intentions, it seemed far too likely.
She glanced at Allan, his expression preoccupied, a frown line etched faintly between his brows. His dark hair was ruffled by the wind, the brown eyes Harriet knew so well now shadowed with concern. He caught her glance and smiled ruefully, but there seemed little cause now for real joy or even the easy companionship of former days. All there was really left to say, Harriet thought with another cold pang, was farewell and Godspeed.
“Remember when I found you here?” Allan asked, interrupting her dark thoughts. “You were curled up among the rocks, looking for all the world as if you were just waiting for someone to come along.”
“So I was.” Harriet turned to him, smiling in memory. “It seems a long time ago, now.” Allan nodded, and she ventured quietly, “everything's ready, I suppose.”
Allan nodded. “We'll spend the night at the inn in Tobermory before boarding ship. One hundred and eighty-five passengers... you've never seen so many people there.”
Harriet nodded. A sailing to America was always a major event in this remote corner of Scotland. Tobermory itself was no more than a few fishing cottages huddled against a rocky shore; it had been formed only thirty years ago as a planned settlement in order to encourage the herring trade, but few farmers had the knack for fishing. They wanted land of their own to sow and reap, and too much of it already was being taken over by grazing pasture for the far more profitable sheep.
Harriet swallowed past the sudden lump in her throat as she imagined all of the MacDougalls’ worldly belongings on board that boat, and Allan and his family with them. Allan gone, and foolishly, it felt sudden. It wasn’t as if his departure had caught her by surprise. They'd both known it would happen. Allan's father, Alexander MacDougall, had talked of nothing else since the clearances had begun.
“Land for the taking... fish fair jump into your hand. And you can be your own man there, no dancing to another tune.” Sandy MacDougall’s face would harden at this point, for the only reason his family lived at Mingarry Farm was because his wife’s distant kin said it could be so.
Sir James Miles Riddell, the Second Baronet of Ardnamurchan, owned forty miles of land on the western shores of Scotland and the isle of Mull. He’d appointed Alexander as one of his tacksmen, to collect his tenants’ rents and hand them over, which was as unpopular a job as one could ever imagine, made even more so by Riddell’s recent intent to turn farmland into grazing pasture... and tenants out of their crofts and cottages.
“No more than a jumped up tradesman,” Sandy had said on more than one occasion, for the Riddells came from merchants in Edinburgh and had only bought the baronetcy twenty years ago. They spent most of their time in Berwick, although they lined their pockets with farmers’ rents all year long. “Asks me to do his dirty work while he scuttles out of the way.” So far the Enclosure Acts hadn’t affected this remote part of Scotland as badly as other parts of the Highlands, but Harriet knew it was only a matter of time. Sandy did too, which was why he’d been so eager to emigrate.
“Everyone is his own man in the New Scotland,” he’d announce at nearly every family gathering. “Imagine such a thing!”
Harriet had heard these fervent proclamations for years. At one point, Sandy had tried to convince Harriet’s father, David, to emigrate with them, but he wouldn’t budge. “The Campbells have lived on this farm for fifty years,” David said grimly. “My father bought the deed free and clear, when there was still land for the taking. And we won’t be moved out by a bunch of sheep, I can tell you that.”
“It might not be that simple,” Sandy warned, but Harriet’s father had just shaken his head. Harriet suspected her family did not have the resources to emigrate, certainly not in the style the MacDougalls anticipated. The MacDougalls had already picked out their parcel of land on the Flatte River on Prince Edward Island, five hundred acres they could call their own.
Three months ago Allan had taken her aside, a walk much like this one except a hard frost covered the ground and the sky was pewter grey. He’d held her hands lightly in his and told her they were emigrating.
“July, I expect. Father’s arranging the passage.”
“And what will you do?” Harriet had struggled between an even, practical tone and giving into the terrible numbness that threatened to overwhelm her. Allan... gone. An ocean and a lifetime away.
Allan was silent for a moment. He kicked at the stony ground with the toe of his boot. “Help Father with the farm, I suppose,” he said after a moment. “Although like him, I have dreams.”
“Do you?” Harriet lifted her chin, but did not dare ask what kind of dreams he had, and whether she was included in them, despite the unspoken hope that still kindled her heart.
“Ah, Harriet.” He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. Yet there was a look of longing and even hunger in his eyes that Harriet instinctively responded to. She took a step forward, their hands still clasped.
She did not have the courage then to ask him what he wanted to say. If Allan were to propose, surely now was the time, and yet when she raised her eyebrows in expectancy and more than a little hope, he simply shook his head and looked away.
Harriet had slid her cold hands from his. The moment had passed, and in desolation she wondered if she would ever know if Allan thought of her as just a friend, or what she wanted to be if given the chance.