Jean brought some furniture and furnishings with her, packed and roped into a cart, to be stored in the Newall’s house until they could be put in the new house: wooden tables and chairs that had been made in Mauchline, the mahogany bed, a long cased clock ordered specially from Clockie Broun, a copper kettle and some kitchen essentials. The family stayed at the chilly Newall house until June of the following year when they took official possession of Ellisland, walking the short distance to the new house in procession, wearing their very best clothes, with Elizabeth Smith in front carrying the family bible and a bowl of salt. Traditionally, a maiden must take possession of a newly built house, and Eliza’s father had been so worried about his daughter’s innocence and her moral welfare that before he had allowed her to go to Dumfriesshire, he had taken Rab to one side (Rab, of all people! thought Jean) and begged him to keep an eye on her and to hear her catechism regularly. To give Rab his due, he had scrupulously complied with the father’s wishes. Perhaps it was a novelty for him to be trusted like this.
Jean herself was very noticeably with child again. Her move from Mauchline to the Newall House had been almost instantly productive, since the chilly old building had meant long nights in the Newall’s big feather bed, with Eliza minding Robbie in another room. Sometimes Jean thought that she and Rab had only to look at each other for her to conceive. But she didn’t think it was twins again, and this was something of a relief to her, if only in that it might ensure a healthy child.
In the new house, a piece of oatcake was broken over Jean’s head, showering her dark curls with crumbs, to the delight of Robbie, who chuckled and tangled his fingers in her hair to pick them out. They drank to the success of the new house and the new venture and, in the evening, there was music and dancing. In honour of the move, Frances Dunlop had sent the very generous gift of a four poster bed with a new mattress, well stuffed with feathers, so the old mahogany and chaff bed could be used elsewhere, for visitors or for their growing family.
It wasn’t long before there were other arrivals and departures. Rab’s young brother William passed through on his way to learn saddlery in Newcastle. Rab’s cousin went back to Mauchline to take up his apprenticeship with James Armour, but his elder brother John came in his stead. There were some ewes, four working horses and nine or ten cows on the farm, including four of the new brown and white Ayrshires that gave such good milk and that Rab had brought with him from Mossgiel, the first to be introduced into Dumfries. And in early September of 1789, there was a new baby to bless the house as well, when Jean gave birth to Francis Wallace, a big, healthy boy, not shy of making himself heard when he was hungry or cold.
By December of that year, and in spite of the comfort of the new house, Rab was ill with a chill and a persistent headache. To Jean’s anxious eyes, he always seemed unable to shake off these illnesses, especially in winter, and the dark days did not help him at all. He needed warmth and sunlight. They all did, but Rab more than most. He seemed wretchedly downhearted for no very obvious reason, and nothing seemed to bring him ease, although he seldom lost patience either with his children or with his workers, his natural good nature always asserting itself.
He would have had good reason to be cross.
Wee Frank was howling a great deal, his mouth afire with thrush which he had communicated to his mother, or rather to her breasts, and she could have riven them apart with the miserable itching and the shooting pains whenever he suckled. Rab brought a bottle of wine vinegar back from Friar’s Carse, saying that the nursemaid there had suggested it might help, if diluted with water. Jean bathed her nipples and the baby’s mouth with a small quantity of it in warm water, and although he screwed up his rosebud lips at the taste, it helped.
In January, Rab was saying that the farm was a ‘ruinous affair’, but Jean didn’t know how else to help. She was already doing so much, while Rab concentrated on furthering his career with the excise, which she supposed made a kind of sense. If the farm failed, they would be reliant on his other work and they wouldn’t starve. But between running the house, organising the servants, cooking and cleaning, taking care of the two children, making sure everyone was well fed, and working in the dairy into the bargain, she was as exhausted as her husband. Perhaps more so.
‘But I think we must give it another year, at least, don’t you?’ he said.
‘Aye, I think we must. The house is so fine, even if the farm is not. I wish there was some way you could get more money for your work, though, Rab. You seem to spend so much time on it, and folk are always telling me what a great writer you are, what a credit to Scotland, so why does nobody pay you very much?’
‘I don’t want to be paid for the songs, Jean. I’m proud to do it, and I have a kind of feeling that they’re not mine at all, that they belong to everyone. It would be like you laying claim to every song you have ever sung while bouncing one of the weans on your knee.’
‘But I’m not sure you can keep working at this pace, between the farm and the excise.’
‘No. The riding half kills me in winter, and as soon as I’m recovered from that in some measure, I have the farm again. But we’ll give it another year and see what happens. I love it here, love the house, love its situation. I just can’t fathom how we can even begin to make it pay for itself.’
Chapter Twenty-six
The Sailor
Then come, sweet Muse, inspire my lay!
For a’ the lee-lang simmer’s day
I couldna sing, I couldna say,
How much, how dear, I love thee.
Rab was coming up thirty one, Jean only twenty five, with three lost children and two living and cherished, one of them only a babe in arms. That winter and through the early spring of 1790, they gave shelter to a sailor who had come begging to their house door. Jean was working in the kitchen and Rab was reading and writing, balancing on two legs of his chair as he still did, saying it helped him to think, while Jean echoed his mother in threatening to saw off the spare legs with the big kitchen knife, when there was a knock at the door. When Jean opened it, a man in a ragged oilskin coat almost fell onto the flags, and righted himself by clinging on to the wooden press just in time. He stood in the doorway, swaying, his face grey. They could smell the unwashed stench of his clothes and his body, and hear the wheezing in his chest from several feet away. He was asking only for some bread and fresh water, but Rab whispered to her that if they turned him away they would probably find him dead in a ditch by morning.
‘But what about the weans? Who knows what sickness he may be carrying?’
Rab acknowledged the truth of this, so he and one of the ploughmen oxtered the stranger into an outbuilding, and they made him up a bed of sorts, covering a heap of straw with a couple of old blankets. Jean did not want his lice in her house, but nor did she want to be responsible for his death. They gave him barley bread, cheese and ale, and that night, Rab took him a bowl of Jean’s broth and a measure of good French brandy as well, one of the perks of his job. The traveller kept apologising for the inconvenience. He said his name was Hugh Kennedy and he was trying to get to Liverpool, where he had left a wife and several children some years previously to go on a long voyage in search of his fortune, or at least some money for security in their old age. But upon his return, with no fortune to show for his years away, he had been decanted at Greenock on the Clyde and no ship would take him in his current state of health, even as far as Liverpool, so he must needs walk. Once he was feeling better, he regaled them with tales of the strange sights he had seen in foreign parts, the monstrous whales and other sea creatures, the scented flowers on islands where the sun shone all the time but where dreadful fevers claimed the lives of many men.
Jean found herself thinking about May Campbell, but said nothing. Rab remarked that he himself had once ‘planned a trip to the Indies’, and the sailor shook his head.
‘You would not have liked their ways, sir. From what I
have seen of you and your lady and your household, you would not have liked the buying and selling of men and women at all. It is a hard life aboard an ordinary ship, but it is as a paradise compared to the slave ships.’
He stayed with them for six weeks or so, doing odds and ends of work for them as his strength increased, rope work in particular which seemed to be his real skill. He could splice two ends of a rope together so that it was as good as new; you couldn’t even see the join, and he said it would last for years. Besides that, he carved a couple of butter moulds for Jean, with flowers, primroses that he remembered from when he was just a lad living in the countryside near Glasgow, and he also made a tiny model of a ship for Robbie, with thread for rigging and sails made of scraps of linen. Later that year, the child took it down to the shallow pools in the Nith and sailed it there, proudly watched by his mother and father. With the spring, though, the sailor went on his way, calling down blessings on the whole family, promising to send them word of his arrival in Liverpool, but they never heard anything more of him. Jean often wondered if he had found his wife and his children all grown up and changed after the years he had been away, or if some ill had befallen him along the way.
Rab had resumed his correspondence with Nancy McLehose in Edinburgh, after a fashion. Jean hadn’t known about it until later, because he hadn’t told her until she found it out for herself, coming across the letters as she was attempting to tidy his desk. To be fair, the letters were few and far between. As always when he was low in spirits – and he was very low in spirits and very unwell too, that winter – he sought solace in the admiration of some amenable woman and continued to seek it throughout that year and the next too. Nancy, in her assumed persona of Clarinda, fitted the role admirably, without ever being a real threat to his home life at Ellisland.
In the summer of 1790, feeling better, feeling more like himself again, he composed the long poem he called Tam o’ Shanter. He told Jean that he had been thinking about it, or something very like it, for some time, ever since he had been a lad staying in Kirkoswald, learning mathematics. He had visited the Carrick shore with a friend; they had been out on the sea in a wee coble, and Rab had been as sick as a dog.
‘Douglas Graham lived at nearby Shanter Farm, and he invited us in to recover from the mal de mer, handing out drams with great generosity.’
‘Did the drams help?’
‘Oh aye. They did. But I’ll never make a sailor, Jeany. Douglas was very fond of his dram, but he had a fearsome wife. On market days, on more than one occasion, he drank away most of the profits at Ayr. Then, of course, he had to resort to making up stories about being pursued by witches and warlocks to explain his lateness, his dishevelled appearance, his utter lack of siller money!’
‘I’m surprised you haven’t resorted to that yourself, Rab!’
‘Aye, well now that you mention it…’ He began to chuckle. ‘But I’ve never forgotten him or his wife!’
He had been mulling over the story for some weeks, but it was as he walked up and down the green lane beside the Nith that the whole tale came together in his mind. As usual with him, he was saying the lines aloud and laughing at his own words. Willie Clark, one of the Ellisland farm labourers, saw him striding up and down, declaiming, gesticulating and almost weeping with laughter.
‘He’s like ane demented, Mistress Burns,’ the man said, rushing into the kitchen to tell Jean about it. ‘Are ye wantin me to rin and fetch the doctor fae Auldgirth?’
Jean began to laugh too, but she could see that the man was genuinely alarmed. ‘No, no, Willie. Just you leave him be. That’s how he writes. He’ll have been thinking it all out in his head for days now, and then when the time is right, it will all just come tumbling out of him and he’ll be writing it down the whole night long. But he aye has to say it aloud first.’
Later that afternoon, though, it began to rain heavily and she thought that she had better go and fetch him in, because he was quite capable of staying out there until he was half drowned. She took his big umbrella out to him. He opened it over their two heads and they walked up to the house together with the thundery rain bouncing off the cloth.
‘Willie tells me you’ve been reciting a new poem.’
‘Oh, I have, I have and this is the best yet!’
He was still bubbling over with laughter when he said, ‘Now Tam, O Tam! Had they been queans, A’ plump and strapping in their teens! Their sarks instead o’ creeshie flainen, Been snaw white seventeen hunder linen.’
The next evening, once he had it all written down and fixed on the page, as well as in his head, he recited the whole thing for the household, standing up and suiting the actions to the words or sitting astride a kitchen chair and practically bouncing up and down, as though he were Tam himself, the blethering, blustering, drunken blellum, riding home from Ayr astride his faithful grey mare Meg, the very model of Jenny Geddes, and encountering more than he bargained for. Jean thought he could have been an actor, but then it struck her that he so often was an actor. The more time she spent with him, the more she saw that he showed different faces to different folk. You couldn’t pin him down. They had often used that expression as an insult. ‘Two faced,’ the lassies in Mauchline had said, speaking of this or that lad, one you couldn’t trust. A knotless thread who would slide away from you at time of need. But this was different. It wasn’t that he deliberately dissembled. It was more that for a brief time, he really was these different people in his own mind. Whatever face he presented to the world was the true one for that time. He believed it himself. It was all too real for him.
When his father reached the climax of the story, young Robbie crawled under the table in fright, seeking comfort from the soft fur and cold noses of the dogs. He would probably have nightmares about the dance of witches in Alloway’s auld haunted kirk with Auld Nick, in shape o’ beast, playing the pipes, and Tam calling out ‘weel done, Cutty-sark!’ to the youngest and bonniest of the witches, only just escaping with his life when the whole pack of them pursued him. But at least there was a happy ending of sorts. At least poor Meg brought off her master hale, leaping over the running water of the River Doon, even if she did leave behind her ain grey tail, pulled off by the youngest of the pursuing witches, Nanny, buxom and fair, in her cutty-sark, her short shift.
They held a dance at their house that summer, to celebrate a visit from Rab’s great friend, Robert Ainslie. Jean thought she was expecting again, although it was early days. They were seriously considering giving up the farm when the following year’s harvest was done, so in view of Jean’s condition and the fact that there would be another new baby in the house next summer, they also thought to take advantage of the season and the long, light nights for a small celebration. They engaged a fiddler, but Rab played the fiddle too, and Jean was still fleet of foot enough to make the best of it, although her waist was not as neat as it had once been. There was no doubt about it, having babies did things to your figure that could not be remedied, not even by tight lacing.
All the same, it was like being back in Mauchline, like the old days at Morton’s Ballroom, and Jean enjoyed the occasion very much. She had baked a great store of pies and tarts and cakes on the recommendation and the recipes of Hannah Glasse. Rab invited the innkeeper and his wife from the Globe Inn, in Dumfries, their landlord’s gardener, the farm labourers, one or two clerks and their wives, and all to meet Rab’s particular friend Mr Ainslie. Jean wondered what Ainslie made of Ellisland and its tenants. He seemed to look down his long nose at her all the time, and she had a feeling he despised her. Ainslie had an estate near Kirkcudbright and an office in Edinburgh, so he would visit them from time to time, whenever he was in the area. Rab loved him like a brother, more so perhaps, so there was nothing to be done about it, nothing Jean could say that wouldn’t be misunderstood.
Perhaps he thought that Rab could have done better for himself. Perhaps he believed that Rab should be issuing
invitations to his landlord and his gentry neighbours instead of common innkeepers and gardeners. He sat himself down in a corner, refusing to dance, eating and drinking noisily, gazing at the assembled company with a scornful smirk on his face. And yet Rab’s own father had been a gardener before he was a farmer. When two of the young farmhands became loud and argumentative on unaccustomed strong drink, Rab pulled them apart.
‘Haud yer wheesht, lads,’ he said, ‘Get to your beds, or you’ll find that I’ll skewer you in verse in the morning!’
It was a threat he was well capable of carrying out, and they knew it. He turned from the suddenly subdued lads to grin at Ainslie in his corner.
‘Beware of the Bard, eh?’ he said, and Ainslie winked and grinned back at him.
Jean sang, when requested, as she always did, and there was enthusiastic applause. Her voice was as clear and pure as ever, and she caught Rab gazing at her as she sang, with that faintly bemused, loving expression her voice always seemed to engender in him. She would have enjoyed it more if Ainslie had not been visiting. There was something about him that she could not like much. It was in the way he looked at her, as though he was privy to some secret information about her, but she couldn’t tell what that might be. She sometimes wondered if Rab had told him more about their private affairs than was advisable or even loyal. He was inclined to lose his head where his men friends were concerned and write letters to them late at night, particularly if he had taken a bit too much to drink, and then he would send them in the morning without reading them over first.
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