* * *
The following day, the tea was served with buttered scones and cheesecakes. She couldn’t have made better herself. They chatted of this and that, mostly how Mr Moir’s work was going and his new studio, of which he was very proud, and his forthcoming exhibitions, of which he had high hopes. People always confided in her. Her children said that it was her own fault, she had a face that invited confidences, a kindly manner. Mr Moir had endured some problems with his family in Aberdeen. They were not happy about his career as an artist. They had disapproved of his trip to Italy in particular.
‘I went there to learn all about life drawing, with real human models. Oh, Mistress Burns, you can have no notion of how much that alarmed my mother!’
‘Naked models!’ his mother had said, with something approaching horror. ‘But what could you expect from a Papist country?’ she had added, sotto voce. Mr Moir was laughing as he told the tale, and Jean chuckled with him, but she could see that he had been hurt by his family’s response and still was, hurt by their lack of understanding of what drove him, what he loved to do above all other things.
‘Parents don’t always understand,’ she said, mildly. ‘But they often come round in the end. You have to give them time.’
‘You wouldn’t have been shocked, would you, Mistress Burns?’ he said, putting down his cup and preparing to resume his work.
‘No. Perhaps not. Although I can remember a time when I might have been. When I was very young and knew little about the ways of the world.’
‘But you know more of the world now?’
She could see that he was teasing her and, to be sure, she mustn’t look very worldly-wise to such a well-travelled man: a matronly woman whose only concerns involved her home and her children.
‘Mr Moir, it’s true that I’m leading a very quiet life. Or trying to. But even now, the world beats a path to my door, I’m afraid, in all its greed and all its indifference and its insatiable curiosity. I thought it might have died down, and it has, a little. Better in some ways, worse in others.’
‘People can be very cruel,’ he said.
‘Unthinking,’ she said. ‘But yes, cruel too. A few months before my husband died, they would cross the street in Dumfries to avoid him, those fashionable people for whom he had become something of an embarrassment. He knew it, you know, he knew it himself. And that still hurts me on his behalf. He knew that it was all over, the adulation, the praise. The solution was obviously death, whereupon they realised what they had lost and they wanted him all over again, just when they couldn’t have him.’
‘You sound very angry about it.’
‘I am angry about it still. I don’t think that anyone could have saved him. He was a very sick man. Sick unto death. You could see it in his face. There’s no denying that look. I’ve seen it even in the weans I’ve lost. You try to deny it at first, but then it becomes impossible. But they could have made things easier for him, could have given him a wee bit more…’ she searched for the right word,‘affection. I think I mean simple, commonplace affection. They could have given him a wee bit more affection in his last year.’
‘Then you do right to be angry, Mistress Burns.’
‘Do I? I don’t know. Bitterness is seldom useful. I had to find a way of accommodating it all and living my life as cheerfully as possible at the same time. For the sake of our children, if nothing else. But it’s been hard, I’ll allow.’
‘I can see that you’ve succeeded.’
‘I think I have. But it’s a weary business. And now … now they are shaping his image to suit themselves. Making a God of him. He was a fine man, an exceptional man, but when all’s said and done, he was a man, just.’
Moir resumed his sketching, and Jean fell silent. Those words resonated in her mind. ‘Bitterness is seldom useful.’
She thought again of May Campbell. She could put the thought of that lassie out of her mind for years on end, but back it would come and she couldn’t say why, when there had been others, much harder to forgive. Perhaps it was that May had been a victim, a sacrificial lamb in more ways than one. Even though the girl had been dead for so many years, even when Jean knew the truth of it all and could easily guess what she didn’t know for certain, she found it hard to forgive Highland Mary who was not Mary at all, but May frae Dunoon with her soft voice that sounded so sweet and so foreign. Her winsome ways. Her spurious innocence. Well, perhaps it had been real innocence after all, and not assumed. Who could ever know? There were people who had judged Jean just as harshly, and more of them perhaps. She felt the flush rising to her cheeks at the remembrance, and Mr Moir looked at her anxiously.
‘Are you well, Mistress Armour? We can stop soon. There’s always tomorrow.’
‘No, no. I’m quite happy to sit here. Just you carry on.’
‘Well, if you’re certain?’
‘I am, Mr Moir, I am.’
Chapter Thirty-three
Nancy
I’ll ne’er blame my partial fancy,
Naething could resist my Nancy;
But to see her was to love her;
Love but her, and love for ever.
She was on her last sitting for Mr Moir. He had said that he didn’t know when he might finish the portrait, because he had other, more pressing commissions, and she had to go home to Dumfries, but he would complete it when he could, and exhibit it when it was finished. That night, there was going to be a gathering of some sort to which she was bidden with her host and his family: people who had once known her husband. She was anticipating it with some trepidation. But she had been told that James Hogg might be there, and she was very fond of Mr Hogg.
Hogg, who wrote poems and novels, was a plain-speaking man who seemed to have a genuine regard for her. He had visited her in Dumfries, ostensibly to speak to her about her late husband whom he professed to admire above all other poets, all writers. They had become friends, and it had struck her more than once that there was a softness in his eye when he looked at her, even though he was some five years younger than she. He played the fiddle, like Rab, better than Rab if the truth be told, and he liked to hear her sing, admired her voice that could still carry a tune as well as ever. Once or twice, he had played the fiddle and asked her to sing her husband’s songs. His particular favourites were hers too: O Were I on Parnassus Hill and Red Red Rose. She could still reach those impossibly high, soaring notes. He always finished with The Deil’s Awa’ with the Exciseman, playing with what her old singing teacher used to call brio. It recalled Rab so vividly to her mind that she hardly knew whether to be glad or sorry about it. But she had spent one or two very happy evenings in Mr Hogg’s company.
She had been told that he was living in Edinburgh now, pursuing a literary career, and that he had two daughters by two different women, which Jean could not find it in her heart to censure. She had been looking forward to meeting him again, but her visit to the city was almost over and this would be her last opportunity for a little while. She sincerely hoped Mr Hogg, with his kindly face, his shock of dark hair and his abrupt, countryman ways, would be at tonight’s gathering. She was always careful not to overstep any boundaries of propriety where he was concerned, perhaps the more so since her liking for him was genuine. She felt at ease with him.
At the gathering that night, Jean was made to sit on a sofa in solitary splendour, on display, so to speak: the Bard’s widow. It was an unenviable position for a shy woman, but she was reminded of her husband saying that he was like a dog on its hind legs, or an armadillo. People were brought to be introduced to her. This was what royalty must feel like, she thought, nodding and extending her hand and saying a few kind words. And once again she felt inappropriate laughter bubbling up inside her. It was like being bitten to death by midges. They nipped at her constantly. Sucking at her blood, hoping that some of it still had a little of the essence of the Bard left. Which, of course, it
did.
Mr Hogg was there and he, at least, was a friendly face. She was relieved to see him. But then, they were bringing somebody else over to meet her, a small woman, something around her own age or perhaps just a little older. She was stylishly, almost fussily dressed, too much lace, a curly wig, a bonnet that looked somewhat too big and too fancy for her birdlike features, dwarfing them. Too much rouge, thought Jean. The woman was smiling at her, a fixed grin, extending hands like tiny talons. The scent of roses, faintly cloying, overwhelmed her.
‘Mistress Burns, may I present Mistress Agnes McLehose,’ said her host, and Jean was aware that Hogg was hovering in the background with a ludicrous expression, something between outright horror and barely concealed amusement on his face. And she did what she had always done, behaved kindly, extended her hand, said, ‘I’m very pleased to meet you’ and motioned to the woman to sit down beside her.
Nancy McLehose. Clarinda to his Sylvander, all those years ago. The fragile shepherdess and the handsome shepherd. Poor Nancy had not had an easy life. Jean knew all about her: the husband who had charmed her, married her against her family’s wishes, treated her cruelly and who then abandoned her, going off to the Indies. James McLehose had managed to win over his reluctant bride by the simple but effective expedient of booking all the seats on a coach between Glasgow and Edinburgh so that he was alone with innocent Agnes Craig for the whole long journey, by the end of which time they were engaged. Her family had disapproved of him, and her family had been right.
A good woman.
Rab had always stressed what a good woman she was. So pious, in fact, that she had resisted most but not quite all of Rab’s advances. And Jean knew just how difficult that must have been. Once, in Dumfries, she had coaxed it out of him. He had been unwell, and a wee thing fuzzy and compliant with medicinal drink, and they had been cooried up in bed together. Jean had asked him exactly what had gone on with Nancy in that room in the Potterow during his time in Edinburgh.
But he had hesitated, even then. ‘You don’t want to know, do you?’
‘Aye, I do. There’s been so much talk. I want to know the truth of it. You owe me that, at least, Rab.’
He had paused, then whispered, so as not to wake the children, ‘No very much, Jeany, if I’m honest, if the truth be told. No very much at all. A kiss and a cuddle. Well, more than one. We made ourselves very hot and very happy. She thought it was a great sin to sit on my lap and let me kiss her and fondle her, even though I knew fine she was enjoying it. But she held back. And I darenae push it, darenae tak it any further, for I kent fine in the morning she would regret it bitterly, and that would have been the end of our meetings and the end of our correspondence. At that time, when I thought you had forsaken me, it seemed to be all that stood between me and madness.’
He had meant, of course, that it would have been the end of the affair that he was inventing and shaping, playing Nancy like a fish on the end of his line, working on her as he might work on a poem. But he had been no match for Nancy’s religion, for her piety and her stern friends admonishing her for her bad behaviour: the scandal of a married woman, even one separated from her husband by distance and inclination, dallying with a ploughman poet. Jean wondered if Nancy had ever regretted her resistance.
‘Nancy McLehose has been dining out on her supposed love affair with your husband for years,’ Hogg had once told her, not without a certain amount of indignation. ‘She cherishes his memory far more than that of her own husband, and no wonder.’
Had Nancy hoped and prayed that James McLehose would fall victim to one of those fatal foreign fevers, Jean wondered. The same sickness she herself had feared might strike Rab, if ever he had gone to the Indies. Had Mistress McLehose hoped for a convenient widowhood while Rab was still available? While he was still fulminating against Jean, vowing that he would never marry her now, not even if she came crawling to him in her shift. But then what sensible person could ever picture Nancy in the dairy at Ellisland, milking the cows and making sweet milk cheese?
‘She went to the Indies, you know,’ Hogg had continued. ‘I suppose it was a last attempt to reunite with James McLehose, because her friends had persuaded her that it was the right thing to do, but of course she found that he had taken a mistress.’
Jean had known a bit about this, but not the whole of it, until Hogg told her.
The mistress in question had been a slave who had borne him a daughter. Nancy was shocked, but even more revolted by his cruelty to the enslaved workers. He was a violent man in all possible ways. And a drunkard. Coming to her senses, she had turned around and sailed straight back to Scotland on the same ship, complaining of the heat and the insects rather than her husband’s appalling behaviour.
Gazing at this plump little bird of a woman, Jean could see that the flutterings that must once have seemed deeply attractive in a young woman, the uncertainty, the studied vulnerability, had become habitual. Nancy could not help herself, her garrulous manner, but these ways did not sit very well on a woman of fifty, just as the too-youthful dress, cut low over an ample bosom, did not sit well on her either. Even so, it was quite impossible to dislike her. There was a warmth, an enterprise and a good nature about her that was irresistible. And a woman who could travel alone, all the way to the Indies where Rab had never dared to go, find her man in bed with another woman, turn on her heel and sail home again to pick up the threads of her life in Edinburgh, must have a certain strength of character. Jean was never done with admiring the unexpected strength of women.
So she summoned all her natural generosity of spirit and asked Nancy how she was and how her family was and even, heaven forgive her, found herself saying that her late husband had often spoken of Mistress McLehose with affection, reminiscing about their friendship in Edinburgh and how much he had valued it and how much of a support he had found it at a time when he was sorely in need of companionship. She could see Nancy blossoming under the attention, but also looking at her with something like disbelief, wondering if Jean could really be so foolish, so simple, so ignorant of those passionately loving letters, the poems, the gifts, the songs. And realising almost immediately, that it wasn’t possible. That Jean may once have been a simple country lass, but no longer.
What made Jean so kind?
They gazed at each other and a sudden flash of understanding passed between the two of them, two women who had loved the same man, in different ways, loved him, known him, and been disappointed in him. Two women with an inkling that in some sense, they were heroines. That he had known how heroic they were and praised them at least in song.
Her prentice hand, she tried on man, and then she made the lassies-o.
Nancy pressed Jean’s hand again. ‘You’re very kind,’ she said and meant it.
Jean smiled, a little enigmatically to be sure. ‘I have had to learn to be kind over the years.’
‘No. I think you always were kind and good and better than…’
Nancy had almost been going to say, ‘Better than he deserved.’ But she stopped herself just in time. The thought, unspoken but obvious, lay in the air between them.
‘All we can do is be kind to one another. Isn’t that the truth?’ said Jean.
‘It is. For sure.’
When Nancy took her leave not long after, she asked Jean if perhaps they might take tea together. If Mistress Burns came to Edinburgh again, perhaps they might meet up and take a cup of tea and Jean agreed. Why not? They had at least something in common. Quite a lot in common. The folly of loving the same man not wisely but too well, the chief of it.
Later, Hogg said, ‘I’m truly astonished by your forbearance,’ but there had been no forbearance involved at all. Perhaps if things had been different in the end, she could have found it in her heart to hate Nancy. She doubted if they could ever become close friends. But why shatter somebody else’s dreams? Why not leave Nancy to the harmless enjoyment of a passio
n that seemed to have outlasted everything else in her life, a vivid dream from which this woman never quite seemed to have awakened.
Chapter Thirty-four
The Drizzler
O, were I on Parnassus hill,
Or had o’ Helicon my fill,
That I might catch poetic skill,
To sing how dear I love thee.
Some two years after Jean had sat for Mr Moir in Edinburgh, and when the new monument was complete, they exhumed the body of the poet and of his two sons, Maxwell and Francis. The monument had been funded by subscription, and the Prince Regent himself had subscribed to the project. Jean could almost hear Rab laughing uproariously.
‘Good God, the Prince Regent paying for my tomb! How we are come up in the world, my Jeany!’
Nobody had asked her opinion, of course. They had told her, expecting her to be proud and pleased. If they had asked her permission, she might have wished, demanded even, although she had never been in the habit of demanding, that they leave his poor bones in peace. And the boys too: Francis and wee ailing Maxwell. Why couldn’t they let them rest where they were? What did it matter whether there was a monument or not? What did it matter how much it cost to build? Her friends and neighbours were indignant on her behalf, but she had given up being resentful years earlier. Save your breath to cool your porridge, as her father used to say, and her father had been right.
She heard later that they had done the deed at midnight, like the ghouls they were. That was her first thought, and although she knew it was ungenerous, unworthy of her, she couldn’t help it. Later still, somebody had told her that when they opened his coffin, his face and figure seemed momentarily as they had once been. But it was a brief, ghostly illusion, shattered by the movement of the coffin, so that the image collapsed into its component parts: bones and dust and hair. She was very glad that she hadn’t been there to see it.
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