Willie Muir of the mill had died a little while ago, and soon after they moved into the new house, Muir’s widow wrote to Rab to tell him that she was having some legal problems and to ask for his advice. With so many friends who were lawyers, Rab went out of his way to help her.
‘They were so very kind to me,’ said Jean, who would herself have urged him to help, had he not already been set on it. ‘They gave me so much support at a time when I most needed it.’
‘Willie was more than kind to me,’ he observed. ‘He made me see sense. He went out of his way to remind me of your worth. That you were beyond price. Besides which, he taught me that I was my father’s son. And I still am, I think.’
‘Are you, Rab?’
She was suddenly transported back to that little room in Mauchline, just the two of them, all in all to each other, making the chaff bed rustle and shift beneath their weight, making the chaff bed sing with their passion.
‘Oh aye. At least, I am in every way that matters, Jeany. And your Rab, of course. All the rest is meaningless.’
Chapter Twenty-nine
Wood-Notes Wild
Waefu’ want and hunger fley me,
Glowrin’ by the hallan en’;
Sair I fecht them at the door,
But aye I’m eerie they come ben.
In 1793, late in the same year that they had moved to the Mill Hole Brae, Rab had a quarrel with the whole Riddell family, but with Maria in particular. Jean had never been able to wring all the sorry details out of him, but she had drawn her own conclusions. He had been invited out to Friar’s Carse to dine, but Jean was never extended the same courtesy. They always used the excuse of the children. Mistress Burns may find it difficult to attend, they wrote, because of the children. And in truth, it was not unusual for a husband and wife to dine out separately. Most of the gentry did it. But she knew full well that they did not want her, not then. They only wanted the literary lion, the performing dog, her husband.
Later, when her situation was different, when she was the distinguished widow of the famous poet, things changed. It amused her that she had become not just acceptable but desirable. Back then she was still the country mouse, the simple Mauchline lass. She was no fool. She knew how to behave in company, when to speak and when to hold her tongue, perhaps more than her husband. But still they did not invite her. Even Rab seemed to think that she would be out of her depths and never demurred about her exclusion. There was a part of her that was relieved, not out of any diffidence or lack of confidence in her own good manners, but because she did not much like these people. She didn’t like their superficial polish, their dissembling, their pretensions, their condescension, even to her husband who, she was still firmly convinced and in spite of her occasional fury at his behaviour, was worth ten of them, each and every one. But he couldn’t see it, and she couldn’t persuade him of it. He must have his heroes. Perhaps all men must. She could only wait for his disillusionment, which she was certain must come.
That night at Friar’s Carse, they had got very drunk. Once the ladies had left them, the other men of the party had proceeded to fire each other up to drink a woeful quantity of strong port wine. For some of them, it was habitual and they could hold their drink. Rab was an intermittent drinker and tended to stop just before he became incapable, although he had more than once, over the past year or so, alarmed Jean by his determination to drink rather more than a dram or two, making himself very ill in the process. But she remained convinced that some of the party had acted out of malice, had intended to shame him: the ploughman poet who was getting above himself. One of their number, or perhaps more than one, had suggested a re-enactment of the Rape of the Sabine Women.
‘What’s that when it’s at home?’ Jean asked him bluntly, afterwards, and he explained about the ancient Romans seizing wives for themselves, and she said, ‘Just how many wives does a man need, Rab?’
But it was no laughing matter. They had urged Rab to go first. He had seized hold of his hostess, Maria’s prim sister-in-law, Elizabeth, and planted wet kisses on her cheeks and lips. Well, he did not admit to kissing her on the lips, but Jean had her suspicions. The men had found it amusing, the women of the party less so. Jean was exasperated with him. How could he let himself be so patronised by these men and women who seemed to lack the most common courtesy, the good manners that would be found in any tenant farmer’s parlour? They had deliberately made a fool of him. Didn’t he understand that there was some part of them, however much they professed to admire him, that still thought of him as the curiosity, the dog that walked on its hind legs, the prodigiously ugly fish that should be kept in a cabinet to be taken out and stared at every so often?
He wrote a grovelling and apologetic letter, which Maria and her sister-in-law ignored. When Maria met him in the town, she ignored him, sweeping past him with her nose in the air. Jean had some suspicions that at least part of her anger might be because Rab had chosen to kiss Elizabeth and not her. Perhaps she would have been more ready to forgive the transgression if she herself had been the recipient of the supposed assault. Who knew?
Rab was sad, then hurt, then very angry. He wrote a handful of insulting verses about his one time friend. Jean was forced to admit that it was not like him to be quite so vicious where a friend, and a female friend at that, was concerned. But his pride was wounded. Besides, she could see that he missed Maria, missed her carefree company, their conversations, their shared enthusiasms. And word of the incident had got about the town. He was being ignored by more than the Riddells. When he walked along the street, men who had once been glad to greet him, the minor gentry who had their town houses here, would stride past, heads in the air, refusing to acknowledge him in any way at all. This was Dumfries, not Edinburgh, and transgressions were not easily forgiven or forgotten.
When Robert Riddell died, some four months later, Rab was smitten with useless regret. Why could the quarrel not have been made up? He cared not a jot for the widow who had always rather disapproved of him and his friendship with her husband, but he had cared deeply for Robert as well as Maria. He remembered his time at Ellisland, those woodland walks to the Hermitage, their conversations about books and poems, with great affection. He was sad and sorry. Jean pointed out that perhaps Robert Riddell’s incipient illness had something to do with the ongoing quarrel.
‘Sick men can make mountains out of molehills,’ she said. ‘The Robert Riddell you once knew would never have let himself be persuaded to abandon an old friend altogether. Certainly not an old friend like you, Rab.’
He saw the truth of this, agreed with her, but was still downhearted about it.
To distract him, Jean suggested that he might like to design a seal for himself. He wrote so many letters, so he should have something that signified himself and his work. To her surprise, he set about the task with enthusiasm. It was a new thing for him, to be working with pictures rather than words. He decided that he wanted an image of a shepherd’s horn and stock, with a woodlark and a green bay tree. He wanted the stock and horn to look real and took some trouble over it, describing how the instrument he had often heard played, over all his years of farming, was a strange creation, impossible to imagine without first seeing it. But where might he acquire one? He sent letters out in all directions.
At long last, after many enquiries from country dwelling friends and much searching through their cupboards and outhouses, he managed to find one. It was composed of the ‘stock’, the hollow thigh bone of a sheep, with several holes cut into it, like a flute, and a common cow’s horn, cut off at the smaller end, so that the stock could be pushed up through it to magnify the sound. Then an oaten reed was cut and notched into a whistle, just like those he had made as a lad, and still did make for his children, whenever the corn stems were full grown. The instrument was played by holding the reed between the lips, putting it loosely into the smaller end of the stock, holding onto the horn, whi
ch hung somewhat bawdily down in front, and blowing, while covering and uncovering the holes in the stock to make the notes. That was the general idea, although the only sounds he could produce from this strange contraption were, as Jean said, ‘like a sick ewe,’ rather than anything more musical. They were choked with laughter. Rab almost burst his waistcoat buttons, and the children joined in, clamouring for a go and all of them equally useless at producing anything more melodic than a faint, eerie moan.
‘Ah dear God, Rab,’ said Jean, wiping her eyes on the corner of her apron. ‘There’s never a dull moment with you in the house.’
But she was touched to see his insistence on the woodlark as part of his seal, and when he told her that as well as ‘better a wee bush than no bield,’ he wanted the motto ‘wood-notes wild’ at the very top, she couldn’t help but shed a tear.
‘It’s aye you, Jeany,’ was all he said, squeezing her hand.
* * *
Jean was expecting again. She wrote to Mauchline now and then, although she had little time for letter writing. She invited her parents to visit, to see the new house. Mary elected to stay at home, which was something of a relief to Rab. He had never quite managed to get over his dislike of Jean’s mother, blaming her, in large part, for the mutilation of the marriage lines, Jean’s banishment to Paisley and his own suffering. Jean protested that it had been as much James’s doing as Mary’s, but Rab was not persuaded. James came on his own, seemed delighted with his daughter, with her comfortable little house, with his grandchildren, even with Betty Burns, who was no blood relation, but who had her father’s warmth and charm when she chose and who seemed content to add a new grandfather to the circle of her family. He had overcome all his earlier dislike of Rab, and the two men had forged a kind of friendship over the years. If there had been any residual ill feeling between James and his most precious daughter, there was none now. In fact he seemed anxious to maintain the contact between the two households, anxious that his Jeany should never forget about her Mauchline family, her Mauchline connections.
In August of that year, James Glencairn Burns was born, but as the new baby grew and thrived, wee Eliza, their much loved youngest daughter, and the apple of her father’s eye, was not as well as she should have been. There was nothing definite, nothing for the doctors to treat, just a failure to thrive, a listlessness, an inclination to fevers and a falling away, no matter what they might do to improve matters.
Ill health seemed to be dogging them, and Jean was doing her best to dismiss an ominous feeling that all was not well. She had always been the chief imposer of discipline among the children, the lawmaker and keeper, the magistrate in the house. Rab was too soft, endlessly kind. As long as they were not cruel to one another or to others, human or animal, he could tolerate all kinds of ‘witty wickedness and manful mischief’, as he called it. She would keep them in line, within reason, because all her own inclinations were towards kindliness too. But he was ill and – for him at least – inexplicably irritable. She tried to put it down to the weather, the winter that always seemed to make Rab unwell. It had been a snowy year, and there were dreadful blizzards, even in Dumfries where snow was something of a rarity. Rab was away on excise business and became stranded in Ecclefechan because of the wretched weather. When he did get home at last, he took to his bed, complaining of pains and general debilitation. She had never seen him looking so lean, not even when she had first known him, when he had been a young man. Back then, he had been wiry and strong. Now he looked increasingly frail to her worried eyes.
They needed more money than was coming into the house. The political situation was affecting Rab’s excise work. England was at war with France, towing Scotland along in its wake, and his income was greatly reduced. Whatever Jean could do to alleviate matters, however well she managed her meagre household budget, it was becoming harder and harder to pay the essential bills and to put food on the table for their growing family. She tried to persuade him to ask for payment for his songs, for all the work he was doing for what she saw as a less than grateful nation, but he would have none of it, and instead, he borrowed money, robbing Peter to pay Paul. She wrote to her father. He helped out. She sang a hungry care’s an unco care and tried hard to inject no trace of irony into the words.
In the spring of 1795, Rab was more often unwell than not, and the care of the house, the children and her husband, all on a diminishing income, fell fair and square on Jean’s shoulders. He had resumed his friendship with Maria Riddell, at first tentatively, but then with something of his old gusto, knowing that he was forgiven. Jean was glad of it. At least it seemed to raise his spirits, albeit temporarily. All good health and good spirits seemed temporary with him these days. He got the toothache, a vastly swollen jaw, an abscess which eventually burst, flooding his mouth with sickening blood and poison. For some days, he could barely lift his head from the pillow. He had the tooth pulled in Dumfries, but the process was agonising, in spite of the half pint of French brandy he had drunk beforehand to dull the pain.
‘Jeany, my heart was racing so much that I think I fainted for a few moments,’ he said. ‘They had to bring me round with more brandy.’
For some time he couldn’t even shave, and Jean was treated to the sight of her husband with the dark stubble of a fresh beard, ‘like a Galloway gypsy,’ he remarked, gazing at himself in his shaving mirror. His face seemed much too thin, pale and attenuated. When they were living in Mauchline, he had written a poem about the toothache, a poem about the hell of all diseases, but this time, he was in far too much pain even for poetry.
His little Eliza, not yet three years old, was failing too. They had done everything possible: consulted with a doctor, who said that he could find nothing constitutionally wrong with her, but that her food did not seem to be suiting her. The child had almost no appetite and would pick at things from her father’s plate. She was deeply attached to Rab, more so even than to her mother. She would follow him around, big eyes in a thin face, like some small animal, and whenever he sat down, she would clamber up onto his knee, often falling asleep there with her silky head resting on his chest, her hand clutching his thumb or finger, comforted by the contact with her beloved father.
In the summer of that year and in some desperation, Jean took the little lass to Mauchline, to see if country air and fresh food could do what love could not, but Eliza declined very quickly after that, and died there in September. Rab was too ill even to attend her funeral, but her death threw him into a long period of misery. Jean could do little to comfort him. She would wake in the night with tears on her cheeks and with a sense of something spiralling slowly but surely out of control, an unravelling that, however much she prayed and fretted, she could do nothing to halt.
Chapter Thirty
Flying Gout
O wert thou in the cauld blast,
On yonder lea, on yonder lea,
My plaidie to the angry airt,
I’d shelter thee, I’d shelter thee.
In December of 1795, Rab took to his bed with a fever and dreadful pains that seemed to spread through his whole body. He stayed there, more or less bedridden, until the end of January of the new year. Worried and frightened, Jean sent for the doctor to attend him, even though he said, with some truth, that they could ill afford it. Doctor Maxwell came, diagnosed rheumatism, prescribed a cordial, told him that he must rest and trust to God. He seemed to be suffering from utter exhaustion, coupled with intense pain whether he moved or not. He forgot things from one hour to the next. Sometimes, when he tried to write, he said that even the words would not come. For weeks, he hardly set foot out of doors, only moving between the bed and the fireside, with Jean dividing her time between her house, her husband and the children. Fortunately, she had some help in the shape of a young neighbour called Jessie Lewars, the sister of a fellow excise officer of Rab’s. Greatly to her alarm, Jean realised that she was again with child, sickening in the mornings,
better as the day went on. It was as though her body had assumed some relentless rhythm and every two years, without fail, however inadvisable, however infrequent their lovemaking, it must produce an infant. She didn’t tell Rab, not at that time. She couldn’t bear to worry him, sick as he was, and fretting all the time about not being able to take care of the family he already had.
Conditions outside the house seemed to reflect the misery within. The previous summer had seen dreadful weather following on from a harsh winter, and the harvest had been very bad. Now, in the dead of winter, there was little grain to be had in the town, people were going hungry and riots were threatened.
‘What a good thing we got out of farming in time,’ he said. ‘That’s something to be thankful for, at any rate.’
She agreed with him, in spite of her regrets about the house at Ellisland, but privately thought that they might have been safer in the countryside, might have found it easier to procure food. It was better when you could grow things for the table, keep a few hens. But nobody could prosper in these conditions. The excise work was equally uncertain, and the rheumatism – the sort of pains that usually afflicted a much older man – seemed to be dogging him inexorably, sometimes better, sometimes worse, but never quite going away.
They muddled through.
With the advent of spring, he seemed to rally, claiming that he felt better in mind and body alike. He still could not work full time, so his pay had been reduced accordingly, but they managed. Essentially, it was Jean who managed, penny pinching here, making do there, and receiving the odd unsolicited donation from her father in Mauchline, about which she told Rab nothing whatsoever, and which James even kept a secret from his wife. For a little while, she hoped that Rab’s health would improve significantly, but a fool could have seen that the flesh was falling off him. She would have said that he looked consumptive, although he did not have the cough, the high colour of that disease. And he was still in so much pain.
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