She thought that for once he had told her the absolute truth. The poet in him always would be able to imagine something better, more heavenly, more perfect in every way. But when it came to the demands of his ordinary, every day life, she was the person uppermost in his mind. It was a very strange proposal. She wondered, in passing, if there could be another woman in the whole of Ayrshire, in the whole of Scotland even, who would assent to such an offer of marriage.
But she found herself nodding again. ‘Aye,’ she said.
‘You agree?’
‘I think so. But I’ll need to get dressed, first.’
‘Are you still sore from the weans?’ he asked, gazing at her, a spark of the old desire kindling in his eyes.
‘Aye, I am,’ she said firmly.
‘That’s a pity.’
‘Well I’m sorry for you. But I’m sore in my body and my heart tae, Rab. You’ll just have to wait till I feel a wee bit better.’
‘I’ll wait till you’re good and ready then.’
‘Aye. You will so.’
* * *
She dressed in the best she had, wrapped Rab Wilson’s shawl about her, and they walked arm in arm to Gavin Hamilton’s house where, in a small back room, they pledged to be faithful to one another.
‘Do you, Jean Armour, take this man to be your married husband?’ said Mr Hamilton, and she replied, ‘I do, before God and these witnesses.’
When Rab had repeated the same form of words, they both signed a paper that Hamilton had drawn up to that effect. He said that he would be keeping it in the safe in his house, where he kept his own official papers, so that nobody could get their hands on it and mutilate it in any way.
‘What about the kirk?’ asked Jean. ‘What about Daddie Auld? Will the kirk recognise the marriage?’
‘Let’s wait until they come to us, Jeany. I’m not inclined to go cap in hand to them, and I think Mr Hamilton would agree with me.’
After this very quiet ceremony, Mr and Mrs Hamilton toasted the couple with a glass of wine and a simple meal, and Rab gave Jean and Mrs Hamilton their ‘favours’: pairs of very pretty gloves: cream kid leather, stitched with blue silk for Mrs Hamilton and with pink roses for Jean. Rab had bought them in Edinburgh, he told her later, so he had perhaps been planning the wedding for a while, counting on her agreement. Then, rousing the local gossips to a frenzy of wild speculation, they walked about the town arm in arm – and in the afternoon – went to Mossgiel to tell the family the good news.
The sudden change in her fortunes left Jean feeling very odd. It was going to be hard to adjust to it. She felt like a woman in a song or story, who had fallen asleep for a hundred years and woken to find everything changed about her. Was this a mistake? A dream? Would she wake up tomorrow morning to the same miserable sensation of loss? Would there be nothing in her bed but a few dried leaves, crumbling to dust when she touched them? But when she woke up the following morning to find his arms around her, his whole body curved gently around her back and his warm breath on her hair as he slept, she knew that it was real. A different story altogether.
‘Tam Lin,’ she said, half to herself.
‘What?’ He hugged her more tightly to him, not quite awake, his hand cupping her breast, sighing at the softness.
‘Never mind. It was a song I had in my mind just. An old song. I’m that glad to have you back, Rab.’
A few days later, he told her that he had ordered a new shawl for her from his old Mauchline friend and hers, James Smith, who had gone to Linlithgow to set up a calico printing business there. He had asked for the best that young man had in stock. He would always like to see Jean well dressed. For her part, she had always loved pretty things. She liked to keep the house clean and fresh, and even to bring flowers indoors from the fields and hedgerows when she could. But although she loved Rab Wilson’s silk shawl, she parcelled it up and sent it back to his family, with a note saying that since she was now married to Robert Burns, was now Mistress Burns rather than Miss Armour, it might be best if the gift was returned to Mr Wilson, in case he should be able to find another use for it. She couldn’t have said quite why she did this. Rab had certainly not requested it. But it seemed like a promise, a confirmation of something between the two of them. Whether Rab would ever be as assiduous in holding to the vows they had made, she very much doubted. But she could hope and pray.
* * *
There followed perhaps the happiest period of her whole life. She shed years and cares over the following months. Saunders Tait, the wretched tailor in Tarbolton, was still making mocking poems about the couple, but who cared when she had Rab and he had her and when they seemed to be making each other so content? Tait’s jealousy didn’t trouble them. In fact the more he wrote ridiculous and paltry verse about her dress and Rab’s concern for it, the more Rab seemed to delight in spending money on the finest printed cotton or silk for best gowns, on new shawls and bonnets, silk stockings, leather shoes, kid gloves.
In the middle of June, having finished his excise training, he moved to Ellisland on the River Nith to commence farming there and to oversee the building of the new house. Rab did not much enjoy living alone at Ellisland, and he had already confessed to Jean that the farm itself might not turn out to be quite the bargain he had supposed. But the new farmhouse was coming along, and he was beginning to make acquaintances in the locality, not least Robert Riddell, at the big house called Friar’s Carse, who seemed delighted to have the celebrated poet for a neighbour and a friend.
Rab rode back and forth between Ellisland and Mauchline as often as he could, and she would generally walk out along the road to meet him. She was alone in the room in the Back Causeway at that time. Wee Robbie was still at Mossgiel, but she would see him most days when she walked out to the farm to learn about dairying and how to make the sweet milk cheese that was Gilbert’s speciality. Each day’s milk had to be curdled, mixed with salt and the curds broken up by hand. Then they had to be covered with a cloth and pressed in a frame under a heavy stone before being laid up to dry. The product itself was hard but mild with a very pleasant taste, and Robbie availed himself of the ready supply at Mossgiel. He was talking now and toddling, rushing to meet her in the mornings. He never seemed to be without a piece of cheese in his hand and was growing into a sturdy little lad in consequence. She delighted to see him clutching his bannock, his cheese, his wedge of rosy apple, holding it out to her, wanting to share it with her. He was the image of his daddy.
‘Mammy, mammy!’ he would call, with a grin splitting his face.
They had decided to leave him where he was, at the farm, until they could all move south together. There seemed to be no point in upsetting the arrangements, and the lad was better off at Mossgiel where there were plenty of people to look after him and where his mother spent most of her days. But she had loved the feeling of his warm body in her arms, his chubby hands in her hair, the scent of him. She missed him at night as much as she missed her husband. All the same, it meant that there was nothing to keep her in Mauchline, no child to mind. It was like being free again. Like that first summer before the children came. But now the year was toppling slowly into autumn, and still the house was not ready.
They were in love and in lust. The honeymoon, he called it, but it went on for months. Rab would always say that when he had a sight of Corsincon Hill at Cumnock, he knew he would soon be home. Jean would come out along the road to meet him whenever she could. She would sometimes go barefoot with the dust between her toes. One day, the cadger passed her on his way from Mauchline to Cumnock, and he reined in his horse.
‘Will ye jump up on the cart, Mistress Burns?’ he called with a sly grin, but she shook her head, not trusting him at all, believing that he would think her a light-skirts and have a wee feel. Her reputation was uncertain at best. There had been so much gossip. So much scandal. He shrugged as much as to say, ‘Your loss, Mistress,’
and clicked to his horse, soon leaving her far behind.
At home, she had made the bed all fresh, washing the ticking and filling it up with sweet oat chaff from the harvest. How it would rustle and squeak beneath their combined weight! Before the babies were born, Willie Patrick had come staggering over from the Cowgate with the mattress balanced precariously on his narrow shoulders, because at that time, the time of her shame, her mother wouldn’t let her brothers lift a finger to help her and her father had been reluctant to intervene. But things were much better now. Slowly but surely the Armours were accepting their new son-in-law, her father more quickly than her mother.
She heard the hoofbeats on the road before she saw him. The sun was sinking in the west but there was enough light, and there he was on Jenny Geddes. He dismounted, left the placid mare to crop the long grass, and they went away from the road, away from prying eyes, lay down together on a grassy slope behind the hedge. They could hardly ever wait for long enough to get back to the chaff mattress and besides, they were husband and wife, and could do what they pleased. They did plenty, and when they were finished, he would pull her up in front of him, his arms clasped close around her, and she would turn her cheek into the scratchy wool of his coat. Every time, without exception, he would run his fingers under her skirts, caressing her knee and then moving higher, until she was warm and wet and wanting him all over again.
In August, their idyll was interrupted by a stern visit from Daddie Auld, who had been expecting Rab to confirm the marriage in the kirk and had now run out of patience. Truth to tell, Rab had been expecting the visit too and only a certain devilry had kept him away. Jean apologised to the minister and immediately upon Rab’s next visit to Mauchline took him along to the session meeting which both of them had been compeared to attend. There, they acknowledged their ‘irregular’ marriage and their sorrow for that irregularity, about which Jean’s contrition, at least, was genuine. They desired that the session would take such steps as might seem to them proper in order for the solemn confirmation of the said marriage. The session rebuked them formally for the irregularity and engaged them to adhere faithfully to one another as husband and wife all the days of their life. The elders agreed, furthermore, to refer to Mr Burns, his own generosity, and absolved both parties from any scandal.
And so it was done.
Rab gave a generous guinea ‘for the behoof of the poor’ and they could not have been more legitimately married. To their surprise, Rab’s even more than Jean’s, James Armour gave them a magnificent punch bowl in Inveraray marble, of his own making, as a wedding gift, and Rab’s friend and patron, Mrs Frances Dunlop, sent a fine heifer, and another friend a plough. Rab celebrated the marriage all over again that night, whispering in her ear that she was his muse, the only one he would ever need, and most certainly the lassie he loved best.
Chapter Twenty-five
Ellisland
Of a’ the airts the wind can blaw,
I dearly like the west,
For there the bonnie lassie lives,
The lassie I lo’e best:
There was no doubt about it: Ellisland was beautiful. In spring and summer it seemed picturesque beyond measure. The new house was going to be quite spacious for the home of a simple tenant farmer, so large that its shadow would fall across the River Nith onto the field opposite. There was a good spring to supply fresh water for the household; there was a garden a little way from the new house, and an old orchard, planted some years earlier, with a few still-productive apple trees. There was a riverbank walk, with lush grass and a view of trout and salmon rising to flies in season. A private path led to the folly known as the Hermitage at Friar’s Carse. Rab had soon begged permission from Robert Riddell to go there and write in the peace and quiet of the stone-built den. He and Riddell got on very well, their mutual love of books and reading making them instant friends. Ellisland was a poet’s farm, sure enough, but even as Jean could appreciate the surroundings and their appeal for Rab, she found herself wondering if that would be enough, if it would be a farmer’s farm as well. Of course, she would be supervising the cheese making, and there was the excise work too, which would be reasonably well paid. But he would have to cover a large area, and it would involve a very great deal of riding about the county for Rab, summer and winter alike, while the fields would have to be worked at the same time. She had the occasional twinge of misgiving about it all, about how difficult it might be to keep things going once they were installed here. Nevertheless, she could hardly wait to move.
The room in Mauchline had been a welcome place of shelter for Jean. She was endlessly grateful to Doctor Mackenzie for helping her in her hour of need, and she had come to appreciate it as somewhere to call home, the first establishment of her own she had ever known as a legitimately married woman, but it had never really been more than a stop-gap until she could join her husband in Dumfriesshire.
At first, Rab took shelter with an elderly couple, Davy and Nance Cullie, who lived on the edge of his new farm. Their cottage, if it could even be dignified with that name, was a cold, old, smoky hovel that he could not think of bringing his young wife to live in, never mind his growing son. The floor was of clay, the rafters were all black with soot, for the smoke found its way out as best it could rather than via any serviceable chimney. When the doors and windows were open, the sunlight trickled in as the smoke trickled out, making a sort of misty twilight of the interior. He wrote to Jean that ‘every blast that blows and every shower that falls gets in, and I am only preserved from being chilled to death by being suffocated by constant smoke.’ He coughed all the time. Davy and Nance coughed too, but they saw nothing unusual about that. Rab fancied they were preserved by the smoke, like a pair of herring. He would sit inside and interview labourers, and he had set up a desk where he could work on a poem or a song when he could find the time, but it was not a place to house his small family.
No wonder, then, that he was glad to ride back to Mauchline and his wife as often as he could, spending about half his time there, reading, writing and otherwise dallying with Jean, playing with Robbie and Betsy Paton’s Bess, or visiting friends and relatives. But he had to be in Dumfriesshire to get the farm up and running, clearing stones, sowing grass seed, trying hard to set in train some improvement of the land. He also had to supervise the building of his new house, often lending a hand when a big stone had to be lifted, for he had not lost the strength of his youth, the muscles acquired when he had, as he described it, worked like a galley-slave at Mount Oliphant and then at Lochlea.
Even so, the work progressed slowly. He had called down a blessing on the foundation stone himself, placing a pair of worn leather brogues beneath it for luck. He had ordered the necessary wood from Dumfries. To his embarrassment and secret delight, he had learned that some twenty-four carpenters had gathered around to see the signature of the famous poet on the order. Alexander Crombie was the stonemason chosen to undertake the project. He came highly recommended by James Armour, and he was making a good job of it. Jean would even have her parlour in which to receive visitors, wearing her fine silk gowns and caps, her pretty shawls.
There were other necessities to be ordered and procured, and Jean was excited by the novelty of it all: table and bed linens, better and cheaper bought by the yard and made up at home, so they were advised; cutlery and crockery and a cookery book for Jean – who was not a bad cook – but was anxious to improve, Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. There were recipes for sweetmeats, for preserving gooseberries and cucumbers, for making haggis and even lip salve. Rab declared that he preferred good plain meat dishes, but Jean was anxious to try new things and Rab – as he had promised so many months ago – had procured a second-hand copy from Edinburgh for her when he was ordering books for himself. He was always keen to extend his own library, even when they couldn’t really afford the additional expense.
Alongside all this frantic activity, he was co
llecting, writing and rewriting songs and always coming home to Mauchline with a budget of new songs that he wanted his ‘sweet muse’, as he had taken to calling her, to sing for him, so that he could change them or modify them to suit himself. Then he would get down his fiddle and she would sing, and between the two of them they would try this or that melody and this or that version of a song, and she found the whole process vastly entertaining. He never left off praising her voice.
In October, with the weather deteriorating, Rab thought that he couldn’t bear to stay in the hovel much longer. If doors and windows had to be kept closed, the air inside would become intolerable. But the house at Ellisland was nowhere near finished. Fortunately, a Dumfries lawyer named Newall came to his rescue, on the recommendation of Robert Riddell, and he was offered a furnished house called The Isle, situated nearby. Although it was a big, chilly place, a house that the Newalls only used during the summer months when they wanted to bring their children out of the fetid town, Jean said that he should take it and she would come and join him. Privately, she thought that if Rab didn’t need to spend quite so much time travelling back and forth between Dumfriesshire and Mauchline, unable to resist the attraction of Jeany’s warm bed and warm body, the building work might go more quickly, and she was right. Her father had said as much, and he knew all about stonemasons and carpenters and what might happen if they were left unsupervised for any length of time.
Besides, being a clever and capable young woman, she had learned all that they could teach her about dairying at Mossgiel, and she wanted to be off to Dumfries, and living properly with her husband. By December of that year, she had given up the tenancy of the snug room in Mauchline, with all its memories, sad and joyful. Taking wee Robbie with her, her own dear lad at last, she travelled down to Nithsdale. She brought with her her mother’s young cousin, Elizabeth Smith, to help about the house, as well as a couple of farm servants from Ayrshire, chosen by Rab and his brother Gilbert. Fanny and William Burness, who were Rab’s orphaned cousins, would also be living with them. William was waiting to take up an apprenticeship as a stonemason with James Armour and had offered to help out on the new venture over the winter until the position became available in the spring.
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