But Ainslie was wrong, she thought, when the dance was over and he had gone back to Kirkcudbright: wrong about Rab and wrong about her. There was no doubt about it. Rab was contented when he was fishing in the Nith, wearing his precious fox-skin cap that made him look like a Galloway gypsy and his shabby greatcoat belted around him, not caring a whistle who saw him. She had never seen Rab happier than when he was seated at his own fireside, the gentleman farmer, his dram beside him, his children playing on the rug. He never minded the noise the weans made, hardly seemed to hear it. There he would sit with one of the dogs sighing and resting its chin on his knee. More often than not, there would be a book in his hand, something that he could read by the light of a blazing fire. And she herself would be sitting opposite him with a bit of sewing or even some fine needlework, practising what Catherine Govan had managed to teach her on those few occasions when she had not been roaming across the countryside with Rab, making weans.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Golden Locks
Yestreen I had a pint o’ wine,
A place where body saw na;
Yestreen lay on this breist o mine
The gowden locks of Anna.
Rab’s masonic connections served him well within the excise, and he was promoted in July, just around the time that his poor younger brother, William, died of a fever in London. He had moved there from his position in Newcastle, but they didn’t hear about the death until September. The news took a very long time to come north. Jean wished the lad had stayed with them at Ellisland, but he had been determined to move on, determined to better himself. And fevers could strike at any time, wherever you were living. Rab himself was far from healthy. He seemed to be ill with some unnamed sickness or other every winter now, taking longer to get over it each year.
The promotion meant a lot less riding, because he was more or less based in Dumfries, which was a mercy. But this also meant that he had to go back and forth between Ellisland and the town, and sometimes he would stay in the Globe Inn, where there was a congenial host and several good, clean, letting bedrooms. Jean was pregnant, but so, it seemed, was Ann Park, the barmaid at the Globe Inn. Ann was twenty years old, sonsie and easygoing, and didn’t seem to mind whether a man was married or not if that man was a famous poet with a wicked eye and a persuasive tongue. The words of the poem had they been queans, all plump and strapping in their teens seemed to take on a whole new significance for Jean. Ann named Robert Burns in Ellisland as the father of her ill-begotten wean, and Rab did not contest the accusation. Somewhat sheepishly, he admitted to Jean that Ann Park had been warming his bed at the Globe from time to time while he was still making love to his wife at Ellisland.
In January of the following year, Rab took a tumble off his horse and broke his right arm, and Jean found it very hard to sympathise with him. She was heavily pregnant now and out of all patience with him, although she mostly held her tongue for the sake of peace and quiet. If she had once started to tell him what she thought of his behaviour at that time, there would have been all out war, and she didn’t want to disturb the children in or out of the womb. Besides, the broken arm gave her a good excuse, if one were needed, to leave him alone in the feather bed and sleep with the children on the old mahogany bed. By the end of March, when the arm was healing, news came that Ann Park had given birth to Rab’s daughter, Elizabeth, over in Leith. She had gone to stay with her parents there for her confinement.
‘Another Betty,’ Jean wrote to her sister in Mauchline in exasperation, wondering what on earth was to become of the infant.
Rab had even written a poem about Ann Park: Yestreen lay on this breist o’ mine, the gowden locks o’ Anna. Jean had found it, although he had done little to conceal it. Perhaps he thought she wouldn’t even make the connection. She had been angrily ferreting about among his papers when he was out of the house, noticing how he had changed plain Ann to poetic Anna. How like him, she thought, in no very complimentary way.
‘Do you really think me so foolish?’ she demanded, indignantly. ‘Do you think I’m not able to read, Rab? That I don’t find it hurtful when you talk about another woman in this way?’
He coloured up, but refused to argue with her. ‘It’s a poem, just,’ he said, shrugging, as though it meant nothing, as though there had been no warm bedroom at the Globe, no child.
Nine days later, Jean herself gave birth to a son, William Nicol, another fine strong boy. It had been a long winter, and she was weary of carrying weans, weary of coping with the farm and the expectations of everyone round about her that she, Jean, would bear all of it as staunchly, as uncomplaining as the Ayrshire cows she milked in the dairy. She was weary of Rab and his propensity for falling in and out of love, his assumption that she would always forgive him, although she could practically hear her mother saying, ‘What did we tell you? But you’ve made your bed, lass, and now you had better lie on it.’
‘I am lying on it, mother,’ she said aloud, as though Mary Armour might be able to hear her, up in Mauchline. She was vigorously plumping up the feathers in their pillows. ‘But I don’t get to lie on it in peace for very long!’ she added. ‘I do not, that’s for sure!’
The kitchen cat had wandered in. It sat on Jean’s nursing stool and watched her complacently through half closed eyes.
‘And you can away and catch a few mice!’ she said, but the cat only began to wash her face, lazily.
They were planning to give up the farm that autumn and move to Dumfries so that Rab could concentrate on his excise work and his poetry, although he had done nothing, as yet, about finding new accommodation for them. She had a presentiment that nothing they could afford or find in that town would be as spacious, as comfortable, as the house they were relinquishing, although a house in Dumfries would mean few if any nights in the Globe Inn for Rab. A settled gloom descended on her even as her strength returned. Rab didn’t seem to notice. He had been writing a letter to his distinguished friend, Frances Dunlop, and – very much pleased with his own turn of phrase – was declaiming to anyone who would listen, but chiefly his wife, how good it was for a man to find a female partner with rustic grace, unaffected modesty and unsullied purity, with whom he could share his life.
‘After all,’ he said, regarding his chosen female partner steadily, a gleam of something very like mischief in his eye, ‘we cannot hope for that polished mind, that delicacy of soul that is to be found in the more elevated stations in life, can we, dearest?’
He was feeling hard done by. She had still not returned to his bed.
Jean looked about her. She had the new baby at her breast, and her nipples were inflamed and raw again. The house was a mess, the bed linen was grubby and his shirts were all soiled, or so he had informed her that morning, wondering why no washing had been done. The older children, Robbie and Frank, were squabbling and quarrelling about who owned a small wooden horse with only three legs, and a couple of dogs were growling over a bone beneath the table. The baby had soiled himself again, and was now posseting all over the shoulder of her only reasonably clean gown.
‘Delicacy?’ she said. ‘Oh aye, you’re wanting delicacy, are you? Oh my, but your coat’s hangin on a very shoogly peg, Rab Burns. Maybe you should tak yourself off to Edinburgh and see if you can get some delicacy frae your old friend Nancy McLehose. Or maybe find your way to Anna of the gowden locks, down in Leith while you’re there, eh? Maybe she’ll give you what you’re looking for!’
The children howled, the dogs – roused by the anger in her tone – commenced rushing about, snarling. The kitchen cat had leapt up onto the top of the press, claws extended, fur on end. Exasperated beyond all measure, Jean seized a ladle and laid about her ‘as lustily as a reaper from the corn ridge’ said Rab, later, half admiring, half appalled at the tempest that he seemed to have unleashed. He hadn’t realised that she knew so much about Nancy as well as Ann Park. But then he never hid any of his correspondenc
e, so what did he expect? Jean burst into angry tears and rushed off to the bedroom, still holding the baby, who had relinquished the breast, screwing up his face in alarm at his mother’s unaccustomed rage.
‘Don’t you start now,’ she told him, putting him to the inflamed nipple rather more firmly than usual.
William Nicol looked up at her, then began to suckle again, sighing with contentment. Feeding him calmed her, in spite of the pain, but she surprised herself by her constant recourse to weeping these days. She knew that it was commonplace after childbirth, but it had not happened with the other weans, or not for so very long, anyway. A day or two later, one of Mistress Dunlop’s protégées, a rustic poetess called Janet Little, came to see Rab, bringing a sheaf of her poems to show him. He was away from home and instead, she found Jean, practically drowned in tears. Janet was a tall young woman of somewhat plain appearance, like a kindly horse, thought Jean, at first sight of her. She was dismayed to find Rab’s bonnie Jean in this state. It was not at all what she had expected. Perhaps she had been anticipating a sort of bardic domestic bliss. To give her her due, she set down her poems, took the baby onto her lap, lent Jean a handkerchief and watched with benign concern while the jewel of them all tried to calm herself sufficiently to offer her visitor the usual hospitality. Once the sobs had subsided and Jean had recovered her equanimity for long enough to feed the baby, the two women drank tea together and ate pretty much the whole of a fruit cake that Mistress Dunlop had sent particularly for Rab.
‘He’ll never miss what he doesn’t know about, will he?’ said Janet Little, comfortably.
She must have reported back to Frances Dunlop, for by return came a big parcel containing a new shawl, a beautifully trimmed bonnet and a length of very fine printed calico ‘for a summer gown, for bonnie Jean.’ None of which solved the problem of Rab’s tendency to fall in love with any tolerably pretty woman he met, but they certainly made his wife feel a little better.
* * *
In August of that year, Rab sold his last crops as a farmer, but Jean took herself to Mauchline to show off the new baby and the new bonnet to her family. She did not want to be at Ellisland for the sale, and she was still less than happy with Rab, although the harvest had gone well and they got as good a price as any for the crops that year. Afterwards there was the usual celebration, which Jean had also wanted to avoid at all costs. Those attending became very drunk and started to fight, some thirty of them, brawling over small slights and imagined injuries. Some were very sick, not just outside, but inside the house too, with the dogs becoming drunk and incapable on the vomit they were lapping up from the stone floors. Since it was impossible to stop the brawlers without incurring injuries, Rab thought he might as well leave them to fight themselves to a standstill and a stupor, and assess the damages later on. He found it quite amusing, Jean less so when she heard about it. But he had the good grace to clean up, or at least to help the farm labourers and lassies to restore order and cleanliness before the mistress of the house got back from Mauchline.
When she came home from the Cowgate, it was to the thoroughly unwelcome news that Ann Park could not or would not look after her daughter. Her parents did not want to give shelter to the child and had indignantly suggested that the infant should go to her father. Perhaps they would have felt differently about a son. Sometimes, these days, Jean would lie awake and think of how it might have been if she had stayed in Paisley and married Rab Wilson. He was a kind man and she had no reason to think he would have changed. In fact, from what she heard of him, she knew that he had not changed, but he was very happily married. The twins would still have been born, and Rab Burns might well have wanted to keep Robbie. Sons were generally more valued than daughters. They would have argued about it, and he might have won. But she would have kept baby Jean, and the child would not have been in Mauchline, might have lived and grown. She thought, ‘if wishes were horses, beggars would ride’ and she still couldn’t quite picture herself married to Rab Wilson, couldn’t picture the everyday reality of it. But she could dimly imagine that she might have been contented with him as she was seldom contented with her husband these days.
‘What will we do, Jeany?’ Rab asked. He was unusually contrite. ‘I ken fine it’s an imposition. A burden on you. And I’m very sorry for it. But I can’t see my wean destitute, can I?’
Jean couldn’t see any wean destitute either. Was that a virtue or a failing? She didn’t know; only knew what she felt in her heart was the right thing to do. As soon as arrangements could be made, she travelled all the way to Leith to bring the infant back with her. She had plenty to say about it though, most of it wrathful. She was reminded of Tam o’ Shanter’s wife, nursing her wrath to keep it warm. She could not help but think about the three girls she had lost: Jean, and then the twins. The coincidence of the birthdates of William Nicol and Ann Park’s Betty, so close, both Rab’s children, was very hurtful. At first, she vowed that Betty should be kept separate from her own children, should spend all her time in the kitchen and not mix with the others, and Rab agreed. He would have agreed to almost anything at that time, in an effort to keep the peace. The very air of the house seemed poisonous, with his wife scolding him constantly and his own guilt eating into him.
When Mistress Dunlop praised her for her preternatural Christian forbearance in the face of her husband’s impossible behaviour, Jean only said, ‘Oor Rab should hae had twa wives,’ in her broadest Mauchline. It might have been impolite, but it was true. He should have had two wives, or even a whole harem of them, like an Eastern potentate. Then he might have been happy, albeit exhausted, and she wouldn’t have had so much cleaning and washing and cooking to do.
With the time for leaving Ellisland rapidly approaching, he had managed to secure them a first floor tenement in the Wee Vennel, not for nothing known as the ‘stinking vennel’ in Dumfries. It stank because an open sewer ran right down the middle of the street and into the river. There were three rooms, of which only two were of decent size.
‘It’s temporary,’ he said, noting the disappointment on her face at her first sight of the place, its cramped rooms and unhappy situation. There was a bawdy house at the river end of the street, and the river flooded all too frequently in the autumn and winter months, bursting its banks, bringing disease with it, although on the upper floor they should be safe enough.
‘This is no place for the weans,’ she said, and he agreed.
‘But once we’re here, Jean, we can surely look for somewhere better.’
Dumfries had its attractions. It was a prosperous town, larger than Mauchline, with inns, banks, wealthy town houses, a new theatre, the assembly rooms where balls were held, attractions in plenty for those who could afford them; pretty walks beside the river for those who could not. And there was plenty of work for an exciseman.
She consented. What else could she do?
At least their household was smaller than it had been at Ellisland. The farm servants had found other positions. To their surprise, Fanny Burness had agreed to marry Jean’s brother, Addie, having met him while she was visiting her own brother in Mauchline. Both Rab and Jean were forced to admit that the affair had been good for Addie who seemed to have grown in stature and good sense on account of it. He had become a much pleasanter young man than either of them might have anticipated, and Fanny had moved to Mauchline to be close to him.
The excise position would ease their financial worries, there was money from the sale of their stock, and reasonably bright prospects for the future. Rab promised that he would soon find them somewhere much nicer to live. Meanwhile, in the November of 1791, they moved into the Wee Vennel: Jean, Rab, Robbie, Francis, and babies William and Betty, squeezing in as best they could, trying to make the most of it. And at least it would be warm through the worst of the winter. Jean did not want Rab in her bed, but there was nowhere else for him to go, so she turned her back on him and put the big bolster between them.
‘You’ll drive me mad, Jeany,’ he said. ‘I cannae even touch you, let alone make love to you.’
‘Good enough. Besides, what else can you expect? This is a terrible lodging. We were better off in the Back Causeway, in Mauchline.’
In December, Rab was relieved to be in Edinburgh on song-writing business, leaving Jean alone with the four children. While he was there, he met Nancy McLehose again. Clarinda, as he was still calling her, fondly gave him a lock of her hair, which he sent to a jeweller’s on Princes Street to have set into a ring. Upon his return, Jean, who knew something of his previous dalliance now, came across the ring where he had left it incautiously on his desk. She recognised the hair for what and whose it might be, not because she knew for sure, but because she was no fool and it only served to confirm her suspicions. He was so open about it all, not even bothering to dissemble.
She threw it at him. He caught it. He couldn’t help himself, although it might have been better to let it lie.
‘Ken, Rab, if I see it in the house again, I’ll put it on the back of the fire. And I have to say, I wadnae be at all unhappy to see you follow it, just at this moment!’
His utter lack of propriety, of regard for her, appalled her. What on earth would people think? The notion of an Edinburgh jeweller recognising Rab – as the man was bound to do – placing the hair in its setting, greeting him with a smile of complicity, angered her as nothing in her marriage, so far, had. Not even Ann Park and her baby. She had been deeply hurt by his behaviour. Now, pure, unadulterated rage possessed her.
‘Get rid of it, Rab, before I dae!’ she added, slamming plates onto the table, ladling his stew onto one of them, slicing bread vigorously with the largest of the kitchen knives.
He put the ring in his pocket, ate his meal without comment, stealing a glance at her every now and then.
The Jewel Page 26