The Jewel

by Catherine Czerkawska

  ‘And besides,’ said Rab, pulling a long face at once comical and serious, ‘Jamie’s come back.’

  James Montgomerie was indeed back at Coilsfield. His attention was, according to Rab, all on Eleanora Campbell and their young son, the ‘merrie begotten wean’ they called the child in the parish. Jean wondered if there had been much of merriment about his conception and doubted if there would be any merriment at all now, least of all for May. It was known that James regularly rode back and forth between his brother’s house at Coilsfield and Riccarton outside Kilmarnock, where Eleanora had taken shelter from her husband. Jamie’s attention was all taken up with the quarrel with Charles Maxwell and a prospective lawsuit for enticing the man’s wife away from hearth and home and weans, but it seemed that May Campbell could not resist the attraction of being close to the man. She couldn’t help herself.

  Her absence from Mauchline was something of a relief to Jean. As close as she now was to Rab, possibly his chief confidante and companion, she was sure that he still had a fondness for the highlander, and she suspected that May herself harboured a lingering regard for Rab that had little to do with the sisterly affection he was in the habit of describing. Perhaps it was just that May seemed to be susceptible to any show of affection, all while preserving an appearance of virginal helplessness that didn’t for one moment fool Jean, although she could well understand that most of the men of her acquaintance would be taken in by it.

  Winter was upon them now, and there would be no more roaming the countryside, no more lying among flowers, or wandering along the lanes for berries. Or singing for him. Rab loved to hear her sing. Back in the summer and autumn, when they were in some quiet place in the woods or among the hills, he would make her sing this or that love song or ballad that she had learned from her mother. He would ask her to repeat the words and phrases over and over, so that he could remember them and write them down later on, perhaps with the aim of reworking them himself. He would ask her if she could remember when and where she had first heard a melody and what had been said about it and whether there were alternatives that she thought might be better suited to the words.

  ‘Oh, Jeany,’ he said to her one day, as he had that night at the rocking at Mossgiel. ‘I was right. Naebody sings like you.’

  It was a casual compliment, but she believed him. Her favourite at that time was the Bonnie Boy: ‘Lady Mary Ann looked o’er the castle wall, and saw three bonnie boys, playing at the ball,’ with a melody that would wring your heart. But after Johnnie’s death, the words ‘my bonnie lad is young but he’s growin yet’ made both of them sad, with its reflections on loss and the passage of time. Then winter came, practical considerations of wind and weather intervened and, for a short time, put an end to their assignations.

  She thought she might die with wanting him.

  This was a quiet time of the year on the farm, but Rab was intensely productive, or so he told her whenever they could contrive to meet. He was writing in his upstairs room for hours at a time, forgetful of cold, his nose moving closer and closer to the paper as the light failed, and as his fingers and his feet grew more icy and more stiff. He would only notice when he stopped, coming back into himself with a jolt of sensation, back into his own body when his mother or his sisters called him down to eat.

  ‘They’re aye fretting over me,’ he said. ‘Rubbing my fingers or making me sit beside the kitchen fire, or getting the cat to climb up onto my knees to warm me!’

  ‘You should be glad they worry about you.’

  She wished it was herself rubbing his fingers to warm them, embracing him, calling him down to eat with her.

  ‘I’d rather have you, climbing up onto my knees to warm me!’ he said, reading her thoughts.

  Up in the gloomy garret room he shared with Gilbert, he liked to balance on the two back legs of his chair while he thought about the work, while he thought about the words. His mother was always telling him that she was going to remove the front legs of the chair because he only needed the back pair; she’d get Gilbert to saw them off and they could use them for firewood. He was acquiring books and paper that they could ill afford since the farm was struggling – but when was it not struggling? Stony ground would break your hands and your heart alike, but books came first for Rab, closely followed by paper and ink. He would beg or borrow books wherever he could, and whenever any of his Mauchline friends were travelling, he would give them lists of volumes he wanted, telling them to look out for second or third-hand copies wherever they might encounter them. If some gentleman with an extensive library could be persuaded to lend a few books to a poet, perhaps in exchange for a dedication to immortalise him in verse, then so much the better. He would return from visits to Gavin Hamilton’s house with sheaves of paper and pockets full of quills, a tribute to Hamilton’s admiration of his work. Once Hamilton even gave him an engraved ink bottle and a knife for sharpening quills that he said he ‘no longer had any use for’, although both items looked so new that Rab suspected they had been bought especially for him.

  He told Jean that he would soon have enough work for a collection. That Hamilton and his other friends, especially the gentry, were beginning to urge him to publish the poems as a single volume, not circulate laborious paper copies as he had been wont to do until now, so that a select group of friends could read them. They thought it was time for a proper book.

  ‘But how would you do that?’ asked Jean. ‘Isn’t it very expensive? How do you go about making a book, Rab?’

  ‘You have to take it to a printer. There’s a man in Kilmarnock would do it for me. But you’re right. It would cost a lot of money, and it’s money I don’t have. But if it was successful, it would make money as well. Only you never know if it will, or how much, till you’ve tried. It’s a risk, to be sure.’

  ‘So how would you go about it?’

  ‘You have to invite subscriptions. You have to find out whether folk have faith in you, to the extent that they will put their hands in their pockets. That’s very different from praising you for something that costs them nothing. It means that people who do have the money, people like Hamilton and Montgomerie and Mr Aiken, the lawyer in Ayr, they all have to agree to buy so many copies once the book is published, and they put some money into the pot.’

  ‘Would they do that?’

  ‘I’m told they would. Then that pays for a certain number of copies to be printed. If it works well, folk will set their names to more than one copy, and give them to friends. And they may subscribe to the next volume, if there is one, and so the whole venture progresses and is successful.’

  She could not imagine why people wouldn’t subscribe to his poems and go on supporting him, but he told her she was hardly impartial. He had been writing furiously, and – with the exception of some of his work that he said was for private rather than public dissemination – he had almost enough poems, long and short, to put together into a collection. They were a mixed bunch, and some of them were inflammatory, speaking as they did about the unfairness of life and circumstance. But what if the venture failed? The humiliation would be terrible. Could he risk it?

  Because the nights were too dark and inclement for their previous meetings, he had taken to walking in to the Whitefoord Arms in the evening, through hail, rain or snow. There, he would pay a small sum for the use of one of the upstairs rooms, with a fireplace and a window that looked onto the alleyway between the hostelry and the Armour house. He told Johnnie Dow, reasonably enough, that he needed it for his writing, because the garret room at home was much too cold at this dead time of the year. But he would always gather a pocketful of pebbles along the way, and, once ensconced there, he would commence casting them across, one by one, at the side window of the room where Jean slept with her sisters. She was in the habit of retreating there when the kitchen was over noisy to do her needlework by the subtle gleam of a rushlight, for she was still seeing Catherine Govan now and then
, still maintaining the not-quite-fiction of lessons in fine sewing. But she was anxiously waiting for springtime when she and Rab might walk out together again. The alleyway was narrow, and she would open the window, letting in a blast of damp November air, and they would converse across the space between. It was not like being beside him, but it was something. Absence seemed to have lent enchantment, for they were each longing for the other’s embrace.

  When he had been at the ploughing, they had turned up a mouse’s nest, a common enough occurrence, but Rab had written a poem about it. He told her all about it, calling softly across the space between them. A lad, passing by below on some errand, looked up cheekily, craning his neck, trying to think of some clever comment to make, but there was not much to be seen in the darkness and what he heard was inexplicable. ‘The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men, gang aft agley…’

  What had mice to do with men, or men with mice for that matter, even though there was the devil to pay when they got into the meal chest? Rab Burns talking to Jeany Armour. That was something to be noticed and perhaps talked about. But then Rab Mossgiel was a wild man and a better friend than an enemy or so he had heard. A wicked tongue and a wicked pen when he chose. And as for James Armour – well, he was not so much wild as grim, but a fearsome kind of a body all the same. Nobody would want to cross either of those two. Not if he knew what was good for him. And so the lad passed on his way, whistling in the darkness. None of his business.

  Eventually, Rab was unable to bear the separation any longer. Jean might still be able to get away to Catherine Govan’s house at night, but where could they go after that? Catherine, quite willing to act as black fit and even to help Jean with her needlework, nevertheless drew the line at the couple using her house for secret assignations. The kirk session would be hard on her if it ever came out that she had encouraged fornication so blatantly. He therefore begged Jean to slip away when the house in the Cowgate was quiet, very late in the evening, and come up the back stair of the Whitefoord Arms when the inn too would be quiet. He had made arrangements for them to meet in private. She knew that this was a dangerous undertaking, but she couldn’t help herself. She would go.

  The family went early to bed in winter and were soon asleep. She could tell by the chorus of snoring. She tried to still her breathing, listening, hearing her own heartbeat in her ears, but there was no other sound, no movement in the house. She lay like that for perhaps half an hour, and then it came, a little ruckle of pebbles against the window. Would the other girls hear it and wake? She held her breath, but they slept on. In the dark, with just a thin shaft of moonlight to illuminate the room, she slid out of the bed she shared with her younger sisters, Helen and Mary. The chaff mattress rustled, but they didn’t wake. She had kept on her stays and petticoats. She need only don the short woollen gown she habitually wore for everyday work, and a pair of leather shoes against the cold. Suddenly she wanted to laugh out loud. What on earth would she say if her father caught her? Or her mother for that matter? Well, she could always say that she was going to the outhouse to answer a call of nature in some degree of privacy. That was why she was going out the door and down the back stair, with a shawl instead of a cloak. That was the tale she had decided to tell, should she need to make excuses. The younger girls were fast asleep, used to three in a bed, used to their sleeping partners fidgeting in the night. They turned into the warm space she had vacated, luxuriating in it, tucking themselves further under the prickly blankets.

  Holding her breath, she turned the cold, iron key, pulled the door open a crack and slid outside, going down the back stairs and finding herself on the flagstones, with the smell of damp leaves, mist and imminent frost in her nostrils. It was dark, but she knew the way well enough, and it had been so dark inside the house that it seemed lighter out here, with the moonlight and a few gleams of lamplight in the windows of the inn that loomed across the alleyway. She crossed the garden, a few ragged rows of kale all that was still growing at this time of year, and then she was out the side gate and pattering along through the mud to the back of the inn.

  He was waiting for her in the doorway at the top of the stairs, beckoning her to come up. She climbed the stone steps, a wee thing hesitant. His arms slid around her, and he was tickling her, making her laugh.

  They went inside. The servants sometimes used this back stair to service the upper rooms when there were guests. But there was nobody about at this time of night and in any case, the inn was quite quiet at this time of the year with only a few tradespeople passing through on their way to Cumnock or north-east to Edinburgh. She found herself in a bedroom, both warm and comfortable, but rather plain. There was a cheerful fire in the grate, apple wood by the smell of it, since Johnnie Dow had taken down an old tree back in the spring. She saw a plate with bannocks and cheese, a flagon of wine, two glasses, nice ones with baluster stems. How had he done this? Had he paid Johnnie Dow? She shivered suddenly. He had planned all this so carefully.

  There was a feather bed, a larch chair with curved arms, a small table with a flickering cruisie lamp, and that was all. An inadequate drape was pulled over the window, but she saw that this was the casement window from which he would lean out and throw pebbles across to attract her attention.

  ‘How did you manage this?’ she asked in wonderment.

  ‘It’s quite amazing what Johnnie Dow will do for a little money in his hand, Jeany. I’ve had the use of this room for a while, when they’re quiet. I come here to work sometimes – and to speak to you across the way. But I haven’t plucked up the courage to invite you here until now.’

  ‘But he’ll tell my father, will he no?’

  ‘I don’t think he will. He’s a canny man. Why would he, when I’m happy to pay him? And when he thinks me a lad o’ pairts. Thinks I may soon be richer than I am now. And already with friends among the gentry. While your father is very careful with his money.’

  ‘That’s true enough.’

  ‘Take off your shawl and your shoes and make yourself at home.’

  She did as he suggested, perching herself on the edge of the bed, for he had covered the chair with his plaid and his blue wool bonnet and a few books, leaving her no other option. Besides, the bed took up most of the space. He poured wine for her and for himself, sat down beside her and they drank.

  ‘You have no notion how much I’ve missed you, Jeany.’

  ‘And I you.’

  She looked round, nervously, but he had closed the door and turned the key in the lock.

  ‘You can go whenever you like. Never fear,’ he said, reading her thoughts. ‘But I don’t want somebody mistaking this for their chamber and opening the door. My reputation is already lost beyond hope of redemption, but yours is more or less intact.’

  He was right, of course. She wasn’t afraid of being alone in there with him, only of being found out, of being discovered, her good name in tatters. But she saw that they would be left in peace, that nobody would come in to interrupt them.

  ‘I’ll let you out later, Jeany. Can you get back into your house the way you came out?’

  ‘Aye. I don’t see why not. They’ll think the back door is locked and bolted. Everyone is indoors and sleeping. Nobody stirs in the night unless one of the weans is ill, and they’re all well the night.’

  He caught her in his arms and kissed her.

  She was faintly ashamed of her legs, bare of stockings, the worn, woollen gown that she had thrown on over her petticoats because it was the first thing that came to hand. She had thought any other preparations would arouse suspicions if noticed. She had prettier clothes at home: a brightly printed Indian cotton that she wore in the summer, a cardinal red cloak for going to the kirk on Sundays. But she had come in whatever was to hand, too nervous to dress more carefully or search out her better clothes. It came to her suddenly that he didn’t mind. She could have come to him in her shift and he wouldn’t have minded. He woul
d have been delighted with her.

  She toppled onto the bed, the downy bed with its heaped pillows covered in cool linen, nothing like the oat straw bed at home. It enfolded her like a pair of soft arms: feathers, linen, smooth wool. And then he was enfolding her too, lying alongside her as they had done so often out of doors, breast to breast, sliding his arm under her, pulling her close. He had taken off his blue coat and his boots, loosened his shirt, pulled off her shawl. He untied her hair that fell in glossy curls, dark on the white pillow.

  ‘You have bonnie hair,’ he said, reminding her momentarily of her father, when she was a wee lass, when he was teaching her to read.

  Rab was wearing a linen shirt and she thought, incongruously, that it must be of his mother’s or perhaps his sisters’ making. It was clean and fresh, deliberately so it seemed, a great deal of stuff and wide sleeves. His best shirt, his Sunday shirt. Just for her. The scent of him was very fine: a wee spice of sweat, earth, for he had been working, smoke from the fire at Mossgiel, oil of cloves on his breath and another scent, the sharp scent of desire.

  It was different from being outside. It was the bed, the very domesticity of it. Like husband and wife. She could not get beyond the thought that they were like husband and wife. That there was no reason and no need to deny him. He was kissing her, his knee between her legs, his hand exploring, loosening her stays, straying to her petticoats. He still hesitated, questioning her, but she said ‘yes’ because when all was said and done, this was what she wanted. There was the sudden, surprising intrusion of him into her body. Not what she had expected at all. Very strange. And faintly uncomfortable.