Jean coped, managed as she always had done. She had no money from her husband’s estate until October, but she got a pension of twelve pounds a year as the widow of an excise officer. She had that at least. A benefactor came forward, she didn’t know who, but it could be any one of Rab’s old friends. She wondered if it might be Dr Mackenzie, but he never admitted it. Whoever it was paid her rent for the house in Mill Hole Brae, and carried on paying it until her financial situation was more settled, so she was secure there. This was a great relief to her. She had always known how to make do with little, but she would have hated to leave the house now, not least because it sometimes seemed to her as though her husband lingered there.
She never saw him again, only that one time after Maxwell was born, and she didn’t expect to. She was no great believer in ghosts. But there were times when she felt as though if she were to turn around, he would be there, and times when she woke in the night with the distinct feeling that he was beside her in bed. She could sense the warmth of him, as though he were about to slide his arms around her, or she could feel his breath on her neck, raising the hairs there. She would have been very reluctant to lose these small but welcome visitations. They faded over time, but never entirely left her. Occasionally, she would wake with her whole body remembering him, like a broken fiddle that somehow remembers the notes that once brought it to life. And with that memory always, every single time, came a longing so deep, so strong, that it brought tears to her eyes, a memory of youth and life coursing through her, undeniable, irresistible, the necessity that excuses and explains almost everything about the love between a man and a woman.
After the burial, in a quiet corner of the kirkyard in Dumfries, Jean had her husband’s grave covered with a simple slab. It was pleasing to her, and the children could take posies of flowers to place on it, which they did for many years, the flowers he had once loved. When they came visiting, William and Dorothy Wordsworth complained that they could not even find the grave, but Jean didn’t much care.
‘Those closest to him ken fine where he is,’ she said.
Later, a trust fund was set up to support her and her children, and after some deliberation she gave most of Rab’s papers to one James Currie, a Dumfriesshire man, a scholar and biographer who had promised to handle them with care. A few had gone missing, snatched by those early predators when she was at her most vulnerable, most grief stricken, but John Lewars had come to her rescue then and sent them packing. She knew that Rab had been worried about his remaining work, distressed that none of it had been set in order, and Mr Currie seemed to be a thoughtful and intelligent man. Gilbert advised her what to do, telling her that nothing would be lost, he would not allow it to be lost, although it might be better if some of it were to be edited. That was the word he used. ‘Edited.’ She had not quite known what that meant. She could only make whatever decisions seemed best and most sensible at the time and move on. Mr Currie never gave the papers back to her, never even considered that she might want them,
But she had hidden away a slender packet of all the letters that Rab had ever written to her, from Edinburgh and at other times too, snippets of news for her and enquiries about the weans, the odd intimate word of love, the occasional bawdy verse to make her laugh, had hidden them away at the very back of the press, wrapped in a bit of silk and folded into a linen pillowslip. Why should she let anyone else have them? They were hers and hers alone, and in case of illness and death, she had left strict instructions about them and their disposal.
She had not left word with her sons. She loved them dearly, but they couldn’t be trusted not to put the demands of their father’s sacred memory above the requests of their mother. It was only natural. Nor had she consulted any of his surviving men friends. Instead, she had spoken to a few carefully chosen women friends. They knew what had to be done. These letters, along with his watch with the valentine inside, she kept secret and close to her. She had not told anyone else about the existence of the letters, and so they assumed, foolishly confident, that such letters did not exist. She suspected that some of them did not even know that she had the skill of reading and writing, thought her a fond, foolish country lass, nothing more. She still unfolded them and reread them from time to time, obscurely comforted by his bold hand, by the very ink on the page. After he died, she wore his watch close to her heart for a long time, comforted by its steady tick tock, like a living creature that held some remembrance of the man who had once worn it, who had opened it and glanced from time to time at the hearts and the birds and the initials, R and J, that she had written there.
Maxwell did not live to see his third birthday. Like his sister, Elizabeth, before him, he dwindled before their eyes. In the April of the year when he should have been three, he died as quietly as he had lived. She buried him, and when the minister said that he gave him into the care of his loving father, it was Rab she saw, not the Lord God Almighty. But she knew it wasn’t blasphemy. Maxwell was so small, had become so frail before he died, that she felt he might be afraid of God, but he would never be feart of his father and all would be well if his father could be waiting for him, ready to embrace him. Jean’s God was kindly but strict, with something of Daddie Auld about him. If she imagined heaven at all, she saw a riverbank, with Rab and Maxwell and Eliza and maybe wee Jean as well, seated there together. Luath too, of course, and he of the footprints on the linen, with his pink tongue and his comical ears. The twins were harder to picture, but perhaps they were there, grown somewhat and playing a little way off.
They were in some dell, on the banks of the Ayr or the Doon or the Nith, somewhere among the long grasses, with the flowers blooming and the birds singing in the trees. No midges. She hoped there would be no midges in heaven, or if there were, perhaps they would be content to dance above the water, without feeling the need to nip every other living thing; without, as Rab once remarked, eating the tops off your stockings. And when she pictured this scene, she saw Rab whittling a wooden boat or a toy pistol like the one he made for Robbie, sternly telling him that he must not kill defenceless animals when he was old enough for real guns; making a whistle out of a reed, showing the children how to cut it this way and that, and then putting it to his lips and blowing. Or making them laugh until they ached, with the sick sheep sound of his stock and horn.
A few years later, Francis died of the putrid throat that seemed to infect so many young people. Again, she had a very vivid sense that she was giving him into the hands of his loving father, with whom he would be quite safe, until she could see all of them again.
Chapter Thirty-two
Mr Moir’s Portrait
How lang and dreary is the night
When I am frae my dearie;
I restless lie frae e’en to morn
Though I were ne’er sae weary.
It was a crisp autumn morning in Edinburgh, and Jean was staying with Rab’s friend, the song collector George Thomson and his family. She was about to sit for a portrait. Mr John Moir, the fashionable Aberdeen artist, was coming to Mr Thomson’s house to paint her picture, a great honour. The night before, she had been disturbed to find herself dreaming about her husband again. It was fully sixteen years since she had lost him, and she still had nightmares where he was somewhere else, sick and dying, and she was grappling with some monstrous burden that pinned her down. She was desperate to find him before it was too late. These nightmares came infrequently now, usually when she was worried about one of the children. But this had been more like one of the sweet dreams she used to have when they were separated by place rather than by death, although even those had changed after he died.
There had been so much loving talk about him the previous evening. Perhaps that had inspired her sleeping visions. In the dream, she was riding with him instead of waiting for him, heading towards Mauchline. She could feel the warmth of his body behind her, and the movement of the horse beneath her. She looked up and she could see the sw
eet curve of Corsincon in the distance and she said, ‘Not long now. We’re almost home.’ But at the same time she knew it couldn’t be true, the hill was further away, near Cumnock, and they would only see it if they were coming all the way from Ellisland. Inexplicably, this distressed her. She thought about the child. In the dream, she remembered that she had lost a child, she had lost more than one, and what would he say about that? She was beset by a sensation of panic. She must stop, change things, do things differently. There was still time. She felt a sob rising in her breast, and perhaps he felt it too.
‘It’s all right, Jeany!’ he said. ‘It’s all right, my dearest love.’
His hand was on her knee, caressing her, moving higher.
It was so real, so vivid for a brief moment, that when a log settled down in the grate, she woke with a start, calling out, leaning back into the space where he was not, desperate to return to sleep. For a few years after his death, this dream, or something very like it, seemed to come to her almost weekly: always with the mare, Jenny Geddes, always the sensation of being held by him, encompassed by his arms, always the sorrow and the worry about a lost child or lost children and the moment of reassurance. She couldn’t have said whether the sensation of him holding her was worth the disappointment of waking, the feeling of loss and panic that was a part of it all, that inevitably accompanied it.
The city was disturbing for all kinds of reasons: noisy, stinking, busy, although the new street where she was staying was quiet and respectable. Thomson was a kindly man, and he and his wife had been very welcoming. He played the fiddle and encouraged her to sing, praising her voice, ‘Rab’s muse’ he called her and she was grateful for that, because the men of letters seldom acknowledged it. Some years after her husband’s death, the great and the good had put up a statue of some strange marble woman who appeared to be flying over her husband, and they had called it his muse. She had noticed that the plough was bigger than almost anything else about the memorial, as though the plough counted for more than he or she or any of them. She thought that they should have made him with a book: a wee book in his hand instead of this strange female, striking a preposterous pose. He had never been without a book, even at meals or on horseback. Besides, she knew with absolute certainty, that she had been his muse, real flesh and blood, warm and yielding, not this cold marble woman with her smooth, impossibly white skin.
They were very mindful of her comfort in Mr Thomson’s house. The bed was almost too soft, a big feather bed that enveloped her like a cloud. Mistress Thomson’s little dog had taken a fancy to her and managed to inveigle himself into the room. He jumped up on the bed and cooried in and she couldn’t find it in her heart to push him away. The warmth of him was comforting, and she lay with the creature nestled close, glad of the company in the unfamiliar bed. Laughter drifted up from the street outside. Hoofbeats came and went. The silky dog was snoring in her arms. She couldn’t help but smile that she should have come to this: fine clothes, a feather bed in a rather grand house, her portrait about to be painted, and a wee dog in her arms.
The following morning, Katherine Thomson’s maid helped her to dress in the clothes that she and Mistress Thomson had chosen together: an undergarment with a large lace collar, a black silk gown over it, lutestring silk, of course. There was a gauzy, lacy bonnet to soften her face and a grey silk shawl.
Mr Moir, the artist, was excited, curious, engaging. She could see that he was positively bursting with all the questions he was too polite to ask. She suspected that if only he could, he would have painted her husband. That she was second best for him. Everyone who came to her house in Dumfries, knocking on her door at all hours of the day and night, from spring through to autumn and even in the depths of a dreich West of Scotland winter, would rather be meeting her husband. Failing that, she would have to do. Nothing would change that now. If anything, the feeling grew more intense with each passing year, as though they clung to her as she aged, a living relict of something precious that they had scarcely known how to appreciate at the time. She was a focus for their regret as much as anything else.
John Moir was ready for her, showed her how to sit just slightly facing him, making sure that she was comfortable. He told her that he doubted if he would be able to finish the portrait before she had to go home to Dumfries, but he thought that he could make plenty of sketches and then he’d be able to complete it in her absence, whenever he could find the time. While he sketched, he asked her questions. At first she was afraid to answer, for fear of spoiling the picture, but he told her that it was fine to speak and he’d be happy to listen. It helped him to know about her, so that he could paint her as she truly was, and he would tell her if she needed to be still for a while. Sometimes they would stop for tea, with platters of petticoat tail shortbread biscuits, sweet and melting, a speciality of the house. Sometimes he would tell her to get up, move about.
He asked her about herself.
She was so surprised by this, just at first, that she was embarrassed by the question. People sometimes asked about her children, but they seldom asked her about herself. Folk only really wanted to know about her husband, and their real reason for speaking to her was her intimate, nay her embarrassing knowledge of the poet. There was always the smallest edge of prurience to their enquiries. She knew exactly what they wanted to know, and yet propriety demanded that they ask only harmless questions. That may have been why there had been so many offers of marriage: dreadful offers from wholly unsuitable people, most of them. There had been unimaginable proposals from elderly widowers with avarice in their eyes. Not for money, because she was not a rich woman. But for stories and secrets. For wanting to go where the poet had been. My tocher’s the jewel, she thought. Her tocher, her dowry, was her memory. They wanted the answers to the questions they dare not ask, but she met them all with the same blandly courteous rejection.
Mr Moir was different.
‘Tell me a little about yourself, Mistress Burns,’ he said. She flushed. What could she tell this young man that wouldn’t seem either foolish or scandalous? But a certain amount of scandal had been attached to his own name, or so Katherine Thomson had told her while she was dressing. He said, ‘No, no, nothing about your husband. I’d rather know more about you. Tell me about your childhood. Tell me about when you were just a girl.’
And that seemed perfectly possible. Afterwards, when it was all finished, she could hardly remember what she had spoken about and what remained locked inside, because the words and the lines of John Moir’s sketches had all flowed together into a single story, like all the tributary burns running into the rivers, leaving their patterns on the landscape of her life.
That night, she lay awake again in the comfortable room with the dog asleep at her feet. He stood up, turned around three times and lay down again, sighing heavily and resting his chin across her ankles. She could feel the warmth of him through the blankets that smelled nicely of lavender. Her mind was busy with the past, images and conversations swarming like bees in there. Another sitting tomorrow, and if she didn’t get to sleep soon, she’d likely shame herself by dozing while Mr Moir was sketching.
She thought about that time at Paisley with Rab Wilson visiting her each week and bringing her tentative news from his family in Mauchline, but nothing from Rab Mossgiel. Since her husband’s death, she had read some of Rab’s letters to other people from that time: letters about her. Gilbert had begged her, with as much intensity as he ever displayed, to ignore Rab’s correspondence from the time of their separation, but she had read it anyway. She had thought she knew everything about Rab, but they had amazed her, those letters. She had been shocked by the raw passion in them. The letters had brought it all back and more besides, had told her things she had never known or even guessed about the depths of his feelings for her. Some of those letters seemed to be the correspondence of a madman.
She saw that he might have made a hundred defiant decisions and resolutio
ns, renouncing her for ever, telling himself that he had replaced her in his affections, falling in love, falling out of love, even going so far as to tell other women how much he despised her, but these all seemed to fall flat in the face of his compulsion to see her, to touch her, simply to be with her. There would always be that foolish, hankering fondness, that miserable blank in his heart for lack of her. She did not know why it should have been so, any more than she could explain her fixed attachment to him in the face of her family’s disapproval and his bad behaviour.
‘Never man loved or rather adored a woman more than I did her. And I do still love her to distraction after all, tho I won’t tell her so, tho I see her, which I don’t want to do.’
So he had written. He had been as mad as a hare in March. But he had loved her and desired her hopelessly and helplessly. There had been nothing she could do or say to change that essential fact. He had written to one of his friends, amid a tissue of nonsense such as she had never read the like of in her life before, and would scarcely have believed possible if she hadn’t seen the words on the page, that he was ‘nine parts and nine tenths, out of ten, stark staring mad.’
She had been retrospectively anguished to read it. If she had known this, she might have responded differently, might have moved heaven and earth to write to him, once it became possible, via Rab Wilson, to reassure him that she was being faithful to him, had been faithful to him all the time. But he had written to everyone but her. She wondered if he had given a single thought to her and her predicament at that time, so absorbed was he in his own injuries. I, me, myself. His letters were so completely self absorbed that there seemed to be no room for anyone else, not even Jean. Couldn’t May Campbell have seen it? Well, maybe she had seen it, and maybe she too had been clutching at straws of hope, struggling to find a way out of her infatuation with James Montgomerie, who was undoubtedly head over ears in love with somebody else. Maybe just as Jean herself had thought, ‘why not Rab Wilson?’ before coming up with a dozen reasons why not, May Campbell had been thinking, ‘why not Rab Burns as well as any other man?’ but had been incapable of imagining the reasons why it would never do.
The Jewel Page 30