Again he consulted Maxwell, who asked a colleague for a second opinion. This time they diagnosed the ‘flying gout’ which seemed only to be a way of describing the sudden and intense pains that moved over his whole body, flitting from one place to another, so acute that they took the breath from him. His very bones seemed to ache, and sometimes he could hardly find the strength to walk from one side of the room to the other. Riding about on excise business was unthinkable. Brandy gave him intermittent relief but inflamed his stomach. At last he settled on milk and a little port wine mixed together, which seemed to soothe him, temporarily at least.
Early in June, Maria Riddell, who apparently did not realise the seriousness of his condition, sent a message to him, asking him to attend an event she was holding to celebrate the King’s birthday that coming Saturday. He replied that he could not come, he was too racked with rheumatism even to stand, never mind walk about an assembly room. And no, he told her, he was not even writing.
If he was not writing, things must be serious indeed, and Jean admitted to herself that he was failing day by day, edging towards some terrible precipice. The thought sent her into a panic. She was desperately worried about him, loving him more the more anxious she became, regretting the times when she had been impatient and angry with him. She could not bear to see him suffer. She would lie beside him in the night, in despair, listening to him as he tossed and turned, groaning with the pain of even the smallest movement. An anxious neighbour brought in some goose grease, and she rubbed it into his arms and legs and his white feet, but even the touch of her fingers seemed to hurt him now, and the ointment did little good.
She had managed to acquire a new feather bed to ease the pain of his poor limbs. Their old friend from their Ellisland days, Miss Newall, the lawyer’s sister, had begged it from her brother. This, with fine linen sheets and a couple of soft blankets, helped the discomfort, but not much. Sometimes Miss Newall would invite Jean out to tea, leaving Jessie to mind the poet and the weans for an hour or two, but Jean could hardly settle away from the house. Rab knew about the baby now, and the knowledge had thrown him into a dreadful panic. He worried about Jean, he worried about his family, he worried about his poems and his papers.
‘There are peddlers, even now, while I live, hawking songs and ballads with my name on them about the streets of Dumfries,’ he wailed. ‘And they are paltry verses, things that I would be ashamed to set my name to. But what can I do to stop them? And besides, my papers are in such a mess! Jeany, there are poems and songs not fit to be seen. If ought should happen to me, see that they are placed in Gilbert’s hands. He’ll ken what to do.’
Jean did her best to calm him, told him that all would yet be well. If they could find a cure for what ailed him, he might have plenty of years left to set things in order.
‘You’re a young man! And didn’t your father live for many years beyond the age you are now? Isn’t your mother living still?’
But even his voice had lost its timbre, seemed to her worried ears like the querulous tones of a much older man.
The doctors, gravely worried about him, and with some inkling that Scotland’s greatest poet was sick unto death, began to suggest other possible cures, even if they were counsels of despair. The water cure was fashionable at that time, spas were becoming popular, but Rab was too sick to travel very far. However, there was a small chalybeate spring down at the Brow Well on the Solway, and they suggested that he might be able to go there. Jean, in the last weeks of her pregnancy, would have to stay in Dumfries. Before he left, as though with a premonition of what was to come, he spoke to the children one by one, patting them on the head, telling them to be good, to behave for their mother while he was away.
* * *
Maria Riddell herself – at last aware of the seriousness of his condition – had arranged for lodgings for him in a cottage close by the well and had even sent her carriage to Dumfries to bring him there. The Brow was a kind of tank into which a spring containing iron salts trickled. He drank the water two or three times a day from the iron cup that hung by a chain near the steps. It was close to the shore, and Rab had to struggle and stagger through dying thrift, the blossoms dry and pinky brown, rustling in the wind like a chaff bed, and then across acres of flat sand, into the water. He was supposed to go in up to his waist, and he was determined to do it, but the waters were very cold, even in summer. When she later visited the place to see it for herself, Jean wondered that he had not died on the spot, his body carried away on the tides of the Solway, like the little freshwater burns that ran into the wider salt waters beyond and left patterns on the surface of the sea. And maybe that would have been better, she thought. Maybe that would have been a fitting end for Burns the Bard, who sang of so many rivers and streams.
Maria, not at all well herself at that time, again sent her carriage to fetch him for a dinner neither of them could eat, and said afterwards that she saw only death in his face. On another afternoon, he visited the manse at nearby Ruthwell, where the ladies tried to pull the curtains to shade his eyes from the rays of the setting sun, but he shook his head and said, ‘Please leave them. I fear that he will not shine long for me.’
He ran out of ready money and offered his landlady his precious seal in exchange for a bottle of port wine. He could swallow little else. He said the ‘muckle black deil had got into his wallet’ but perhaps his seal would do instead. She would not take it, but she filled his bottle anyway. They spoke of flounders. As a lass, the woman had kilted up her skirts and gone flounder trampling on the Solway. Rab said he would have given a good deal to have seen her. She spoke lightly of life in the face of death. Afterwards, she told Jean all about it, and Jean was grateful to her for her kindness, her determined good cheer in the face of tragedy.
He learned that a haberdasher, suspecting that he was dying, had taken out a writ against him for an unpaid bill. It was a relatively small sum, and the bill would certainly have been paid by any number of the poet’s friends or relatives, but the news threw him into a panic. Jean wondered uneasily if the threat had cast his mind, confused by sickness, back to those months when her parents had conspired to have him thrown in jail. His illness meant that his salary would be reduced, would hardly be enough to support his family. And he was aware that Jean’s confinement was imminent.
He wrote desperately to James Armour, ‘For Heaven’s sake and as you value the welfare of your daughter and my wife, do, my dearest Sir, write to Fife to Mistress Armour, to come, if possible.’
He sent a flurry of terrible, panic stricken letters: to James, to an unresponsive Frances Dunlop, to Gilbert, to his cousin in Montrose, James Burness, asking for money to pay the haberdasher. He wrote to Mr Thomson in Edinburgh with the same plea. Both Thomson and Burness readily arranged for money to be forwarded, said later that they had had no idea how ill he really was, but it all came much too late. Although he had been ailing for some time, the slide into acute illness happened so quickly that it seemed to take all of them except those closest to him by surprise. He wrote to Jean, in Dumfries. He said that the sea bathing had eased his pains but he could eat nothing. He told her he was glad that Jessie was beside her, helping her.
He called her his dearest love.
He had to borrow a gig to bring him home, like Jean herself when Doctor Mackenzie had taken her to Willie’s Mill in disgrace. There was a farmer in Locharwoods, John Clark, who lent him his gig, with a fine gentry horse to pull it, and a man to drive it. He could not have ridden by himself. His landlady, she of the flounder trampling, had persuaded the farmer that it would be a good thing to do and that he would be remembered afterwards for his kindness to the great poet in his last days.
Rab could barely step down from the gig when he arrived home. He was all wrapped up in his plaid, although it was high summer. They had to stop at the bottom of the Mill Vennel that was much too steep for the horse. There had been a shower of rain, and the cobbl
es were slippery. His face was grey from the pain of the journey. He couldn’t stand upright and Jessie, the lass who was helping Jean in the house, had to go out and oxter him in. He was muttering that he was worried about his papers, his poems. He still fretted that he had left indifferent pieces behind and they would be thrust upon the world when he was gone, with all their imperfections still upon them.
They were shocked by the deterioration in him, but Jean most of all. She gazed at him and thought that her heart would break. He looked skeletal, shook and shivered, and seemed in even more pain than when he had left. They put him to bed, and there he stayed, slipping in and out of sleep, or delirium, or both, it was hard to tell, and whenever he slept, they feared that he would never wake again.
Once, he came to himself abruptly and said, ‘Don’t let the Awkward Squad fire over me!’ to Jessie’s brother, John Lewars, who was watching at his bedside.
He meant the Dumfries volunteers, of course, few of them very efficient or soldierly. And John reassured him that they would not, but of course, they did.
Jean nursed him as best she could, determined to see her man out of the world, if it was God’s will that he should go. But she would not have been able to do it without Jessie’s help. Jean could and did sing to him, quietly, as she had sung to all their children, and her voice seemed to soothe him.
Very early on the morning of 21st July, she had been dozing in a chair, so far advanced in her pregnancy that she could not comfortably fall asleep. The child was kicking and tumbling inside her, as it did whenever she rested. Jessie had come in with his medicine and tried to hold the cup to his chapped lips, tried to rouse him a little, but he pushed it away. His face was so thin now that he looked all unlike himself. Even his nose seemed to have become finer, sharper.
Jean got up, steadying herself on the arm of the chair, and took the cup from Jessie. ‘Rab, my dear, you need to take your medicine. It’ll do you some good, ease the pain, if you can only try to swallow it.’
She sat on the edge of the bed, stroked his forehead gently, stroked the dark hair, shot through with grey. Suddenly, she had the strangest feeling, as though this was all unreal, as though there might be some magical place where she could turn back time, make it all different, if only she could get to it, if only she could reach it. There, he would be as she had known him at first: her strong, young lover, her husband, her man.
He woke at the sound of her voice, or perhaps her familiar touch, gazed at her, raised his head and drank a mouthful of the cordial, coughing at the bitter taste of it. He tried to say her name, recognition in his eyes for an instant, reached out his arms to her and then fell back on the bed.
‘Oh Jeany,’ said Jessie Lewars. ‘Oh dear Jeany, I think he’s gone.’
She was right.
Chapter Thirty-one
And Fare thee Weel
Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run.
Jean and Jessie laid out the body, washing it lovingly. It was the very last time Jean could touch him, stroke his skin, plant a kiss on his cold cheek. But it only served to underline the profound difference between life and death. Even when he had lain at death’s door, there had been something of the old Rab, the man she had loved so deeply, inhabiting this ravaged body. Now, nothing of him remained at all. Not in this sad shell, anyway. She was too exhausted, too shocked for tears, although there was plenty of weeping later. Weeping and worrying. What was she to do? How were they to live? But since the demands of the present were paramount, Jessie took the children out into the countryside round about Dumfries, to gather herbs and flowers to strew in the coffin: late roses, honeysuckle, creamy meadowsweet, gowans. It kept them busy, kept them from worrying about their mother and mourning their father too keenly. Jean watched with the body, only dozing in the chair until they came to lay him in his coffin.
She had wanted to go to the funeral. She had wanted to walk in procession behind the bier, however difficult, however scandalous for a woman, especially one in her advanced state of pregnancy. Gilbert had come from Mauchline and had promised to escort her, even though he disapproved of her decision. The funeral invitations had been sent out in young Robbie’s name, as was only fitting. Whether Jean liked it or not, it was going to be a very grand occasion. The night before was showery, but as though in celebration of a poet who had loved nature in all her guises, the day turned fine and sunny just in time for the procession. The showers had washed the streets clean. The town smelled unusually fresh and sweet.
On the morning of the funeral, before she could even dress, her pains began. It was clear that she could not leave the house. An hour after they had come to carry Rab away, her waters broke, streaming onto the stone floor. She went into labour and gave birth to his last son, Maxwell, on the same day. Few people perceived or even cared how terrible that was for her: to be in such pain and distress at that time. Jessie, perhaps, although Jessie had no weans of her own yet. Mary Armour might have offered her some comfort, but Mary was in Fife and word had only just reached her. Rab’s heartbroken mother would know what she was feeling. Nobody else. No man would have fully understood the darkness that engulfed her during the hours that she laboured for love of him on such a day.
Jean told only a few people that the night after the funeral, as she lay in their bed, wrapped up in blankets, aching for the warmth of her husband’s body beside her, with the shape of his head in the pillow still and a few dark hairs attached to it, he had come to her. The whole house was quiet, Maxwell swaddled in her arms. She had been singing to the new wean until he slept, and she saw Rab coming into the room. He was as bold and clear as though he had still been in life and, she thought, rather more healthy than the last time she had laid eyes on him, a gleam in his eye and a flush of sunlight on his cheek.
She was not afraid.
When had she ever been afraid of him except just that one time, in the stable, in the Back Causeway? Rather she felt the wee bubble of laughter that she had so often felt with him, laughter, even in the most serious of situations, at the general absurdity of everything, even the very worst of things. She looked up at him while he gazed down at her and, in particular she thought, at the baby. Well, why not? He had aye loved the weans best, loved the curve of their cheeks, the soft, vulnerable place at the back of the neck, their perfect wee fingers and toes. Then he shook his head sadly, as though regretting that he could not stay, and disappeared, so suddenly that it seemed like a snowflake, melting away in your hand.
* * *
Afterwards, she was relieved that she hadn’t been able to attend the funeral. According to Gilbert, who was in tears, and had to be comforted with Rab’s best French brandy, they all came scuttling out of the woodwork like beetles or spiders, to show how much they thought of Rab. There was a procession to St Michael’s kirk, not far away from their house. The ill rehearsed band played the Dead March from Saul, with many a squeak and shriek and false note. All those people who had cut him a couple of years earlier, after the quarrel with the Riddell family, turned out to mourn Scotland’s Bard, and the Awkward Squad fired numerous volleys over his grave. He would have laughed long and loud to hear them, even though he had begged Lewars not to let them do it.
After a scarcely decent interval, they came about his widow like wasps from a byke, seeking anything that they might acquire or make use of: his poems, rough drafts and finished, his letters, his books, his very clothes if she had allowed them, which she did not. They all wanted something, anything, to remind them of the man they had too often shunned or patronised or underestimated while he was in life. But he was safely dead now and could neither discomfort them nor embarrass them with his challenging presence, and so they were free to worship him or denigrate him, or judge him as they saw fit. She understood it well enough because th
ey had patronised and underestimated her too, still did in many ways.
They were forever telling her that he had promised them this or that poem, but anything would do: papers with his writing on, scraps, handkerchiefs even, anything. She had to conceal his clothes and lock the cupboard doors. She thought they would have taken the very feathers and splinters of wood from their bed, if she had allowed it. She caught one of them, a very respectable Dumfries merchant, actually making off with her husband’s big umbrella. The man pretended he had thought it was his own, but not a drop of rain had fallen that day. The sun was shining and nobody was carrying an umbrella. She sometimes felt that if they could have anatomised her and taken parts of her away with them, they would have done it without a moment’s hesitation.
They told her that her husband had been a great man, which she knew, but with some faults, which she also knew all too well, but which she would never admit now, fiercely loyal to him in death as in life. Somebody wrote in a local newspaper that ‘His extraordinary endowments were accompanied by frailties which rendered them useless to himself and his family.’ The words were burned into her head and her heart. She could never forget or forgive them. He had been provoking, impulsive and often unwise, but he had never been useless to her, never lacking in affection. And if he could be scornful of hypocrisy, he was also one of the kindest men she had ever known. A good heart, she thought. He had such a good, warm heart. She wished they would all go away and leave her in peace. All except Jessie. Jessie did not desert Jean. She stayed to help with the children. She told Jean, shyly, how Rab would talk to her about her various suitors, for she was a clever lass, telling her that one of them had ‘not as much brains as a midge could lean its elbow on!’
‘And d’you know, Jean, he was right!’ she said, laughing and weeping at the same time. It was good to talk about him. It brought him back into their minds, as though he might walk through the door at any moment.
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