* * *
The other children lived and thrived. Some of Rab’s old friends wanted to send the boys to the grammar school in Ayr, but Jean wouldn’t have it and stubbornly refused their kind offers of help. She wanted to keep her children by her and to stay in Dumfries. Robbie was a clever lad, telling anyone who would listen that his father had been no rustic ploughman poet, but an educated man, which was nothing less than the truth. He went to Edinburgh University, then to Glasgow, and thence to a position in the Stamp Office in London, which did not suit him so well. He wrote poems, but more out of a sense of duty to his late father than from any real inclination. William and James became soldiers, joined the Indian Army and did very well for themselves. James married out there in India, but two of his children died young and his wife followed them while giving birth to a third child, a daughter named Sarah. When she was old enough to travel, this little girl was sent to Scotland to stay with Jean.
In 1828, an artist called Samuel Mackenzie painted a portrait of the two of them, grandmother and granddaughter together. Mr Mackenzie was by no means as congenial as Mr Moir and the portrait, competent rather than sympathetic, depicted Jean with only the remnants, a faint shadow, of the prettiness that John Moir had seen in her face some sixteen years earlier. She looked her age: plump and handsome still, but with a face somewhat marked by sorrow and suffering. Even while they were sitting for the portrait, with Sarah fidgeting and anxious to be gone, Jean wondered what had become of Mr Moir’s portrait and why he had not yet finished it.
For this new picture, she wore a smart bonnet under which her iron-grey hair curls still softened her face, a fine shawl and a good silk gown. Rab would have been pleased to see her so well dressed. Sarah perched beside her, the very image of youth and health, an elfin face over a white muslin gown, the height of fashion, with puffed sleeves, ribbons and lace, and pretty pantalettes beneath, as befitted her girlhood. She loved that dress and could hardly be persuaded to take it off at night. Only the promise of an equally pretty nightgown comforted her. Her hair was as short as a boy’s, and one arm was propped around her grandmother’s shoulders. The other hand held a tiny bloom, picked only a few moments before and twirled between her starfish fingers: a dandelion head, with the seeds just ready to be blown away, telling time. The artist asked Jean to hold her spectacles, and placed a heavy book beside her, which he seemed to think signified her husband in some way, clever men being fond of weighty correspondences, although as soon as they were done sitting, Jean was blowing on the dandelion and making her granddaughter laugh. Which was precisely what Rab would have been doing as well.
A few years after Mr Mackenzie’s harsher depiction, and quite unexpectedly, John Moir came to show Jean his finished portrait. He felt guilty at the tremendous delay. He couldn’t explain it, save to say that the years had galloped by – ‘So they have,’ she said – and he had been busy with many other pressing commissions. She suspected that he had become aware of her advancing age and frailty, and had decided that he really must finish her portrait before she joined her husband.
It was a very beautiful picture.
It reminded her of a time when she was still a desirable woman, bonnie and buxom, a reasonably wealthy widow. She had not been lacking in suitors over the years, but she had turned all of them down. How could she ever be sure that any of them liked her for herself alone and not as a living mausoleum to her husband? How terrible to creep into bed with a man who wanted you for your secrets and memories rather than for yourself. Besides, she had wanted no other man. She knew that it was perfectly possible to love more than once. She had friends and relatives who had married two or even three times. But it was not for her. She had always told Rab that he was the only man for her, and it was the plain truth. It would have been all the same, whether he had been Scotland’s Bard or a tenant farmer. It would have made no difference to her enduring love for him.
If there had been one surprise, it had been this happiness, this unanticipated contentment. Over almost all the years of her widowhood, she had been as happy as it was possible for a woman to be, and she had seen no reason whatsoever to change that, to give any other man power over her. She had made a great many faithful female friends and enjoyed their companionship enormously. They walked along the Nith in spring and summer, took tea together, listened to music. She was very well respected in the town, increasingly so with every year that passed. She had many visitors to the house in the Mill Hole Vennel, and she treated them all with the same courtesy and kindness, showing them the poet’s chair, the poet’s bed that was also her bed, the poet’s toddy ladle and his painted china punch bowl. They gawped and asked foolish questions and begged for souvenirs, things to take away with them, but she refused them all.
‘Everything that could be given away has been given,’ she said, politely. ‘This my home now and these are my possessions.’
She kept fresh flowers in the windows in spring and summer, and was amused to find that some visitors surreptitiously plucked the blossoms from them, perhaps to press between the leaves of a book. But apart from her official role as widow to the great poet, there had been plenty to keep her busy over the years: visits to Mauchline, to Gilbert and his family now living in East Lothian, to Ann Park’s Betty, to Mr and Mrs Thomson in Edinburgh.
She even, on one visit to the capital, kept her promise to take tea with Nancy McLehose. They drank out of fine china cups and ate exceedingly fancy cakes together and discovered that they got on rather well. They had more in common than they could ever have supposed, including a liking for pretty clothes, jewellery and pictures. They spoke of silk scarves and embroidered stockings and the very latest fashions in shawls and gloves.
But there was more to be said, and at last, they came to it.
Back in 1802, Jean knew that a volume of her husband’s intimate ‘Letters Addressed to Clarinda’ had been published, but almost immediately suppressed. She asked Nancy about it.
Nancy blushed, rested her little hand on her breast. ‘Oh my dear Mistress Burns, it was a great betrayal! A friend of a friend, John Findlay, asked if he could borrow them from me, and I very foolishly agreed.’
‘Oh aye. They love to borrow from us, don’t they? But their understanding of the term is not the same as mine. When I borrow, I generally intend to give back.’
‘We are far too trusting. Why do we ever trust men? I trusted Mr Findlay. But he handed them over to a certain Mr Stewart, in Glasgow, telling him that he had my permission, and he saw fit to publish them. I was mortified, I assure you. But I had influential friends back then, and the letters were returned to me, the books mostly destroyed. I suppose a few copies are still in existence. Findlay told me that I could have made some money from the publication, but I simply could not do it.’
‘Which is greatly to your credit,’ said Jean. ‘I know something of your story, and things must have been hard for you during those years.’
‘They were. But then, you yourself have never lived in the lap of luxury, have you? And yet here we are, we two, surviving!’
‘Here we are indeed.’
Nancy even confessed, to Jean’s utter astonishment, that on a few occasions, when funds had been sorely lacking, she had sat in the theatre behind some well dressed man, or sidled up beside him in some crowded assembly, and had taken the liberty of snipping a small amount of gold trim off his costume. Jean had heard of such things but had never known anyone who had actually dared to do it.
‘You mean you were a drizzler,’ she whispered, and Nancy put her finger to her lips and giggled like a girl.
‘I suppose I was! But is it any worse, I wonder, than picking and poking and prying at the memory of a great and wonderful man?’
It was a serious crime, but Nancy had never been caught. She showed Jean the tiny scissors she used to keep in her pocket, and now kept in her reticule for more legitimate purposes, scissors in the shape of a bird wi
th a needle sharp beak.
‘You know, if you wear a deep lace frill at your wrist, they never notice the blades in your palm!’ she said. ‘They’re too busy with their eyes on your breast. Or they were, back then. My figure is not what it was. But rich men are such easy prey. Picots were good. Dangling spangles were simple. Such rich pickings, Mistress Burns. I used to conceal the bits and pieces in my sleeves, once cut, and then transfer them to my pocket. And do you remember there was a fashion for gilded acorn trims one year?’
‘I do. I thought them very fine.’
‘So quick to snip. Fringes too. There was one young buck who wore medallions of beaten gold with cupids. I had two of them. Well, to tell the truth, I have them still. I could not bear to send such wee cherubs for melting.’
‘What did you do with the rest?’ Jean asked, intrigued.
‘Took them home and teased the gold from the silken thread. There is a skill in that too. Most of the men were none the wiser. I’m sure they thought that their embellishments had fallen off. Blamed the poor seamstress.’
Jean had heard that there were women in Edinburgh to whom you could take all these bits of gold, once you had amassed enough of them. It was very much a woman’s trade. The scraps would be weighed and cash would be paid, with the gold eventually being melted down and put to other uses. New trims, perhaps. The money had, so Nancy confessed, helped her to escape absolute penury on more than one occasion.
‘But you don’t do it now, do you?’ Jean pressed her.
‘No.’ She shook her head, sadly. ‘I think I would not risk it. I’m too old to be able to distract them. They do not like to gaze at me as they once did, and my fingers are not as nimble as they once were.’
‘Oh, Mistress McLehose!’ said Jean, torn between disapproval and a sneaking admiration at the woman’s enterprise.
‘Well,’ said Nancy, licking her finger and picking up the last crumbs of her cake. ‘Men so often deserve it, don’t you think? Some of them, anyway. Peacocks. Strutting about in all their finery! Expecting us to fall in with their plans and schemes. Expecting us to agree with them and worship them and love them in spite of everything.’
‘I suppose so. But it depends a good deal on the man, you know.’
‘Och, you’re right, Mistress Burns, it does, to be sure.’
‘I’m very much afraid I could never say no to Rab.’
‘Oh I could,’ said Nancy. ‘More’s the pity.’
She looked at Jean, biting her lip, wondering if she had gone too far.
And then they laughed until the tears ran down their cheeks, and called for more tea and perhaps just another slice or two of that delicious cake.
It was true though. Jean could never have said no to Rab. Very few women could say no to Rab. In fact, she rather admired Nancy McLehose for her strength of character or possibly her piety, very much belied by the drizzling. But perhaps she had simply been fearful of the consequences where Rab was concerned. Jean had almost no regrets. One or two. She regretted that she had not been stronger. She regretted the names cut out of the paper. Still wondered if, had they been safely married and living at Mossgiel, wee Jeany might have lived.
Ah but her memories were rich, rich beyond imagining.
She still found herself dreaming of her husband from time to time, his blue coat, his plaid tied just so, not like the others, a fact which had so annoyed her poor father at first, his bonnie black hair curling down on his collar, his fine dark eyes, glowing with life and merriment, his smile, his way of making you laugh even when you thought you might be going to cry. His gentle hands that knew how to give you so much pleasure. His nose in a book. His poems. His songs. Especially his songs.
‘Sing to me, Jeany,’ he would say.
That night, in her dream, she sang:
Tho’ I were doom’d to wander on,
Beyond the sea, beyond the sun,
Till my last weary sand was run;
Till then – and then I love thee!
And she woke, with his song on her lips.
Historical Note
In 1996 I was commissioned to write a radio play about the creation of Robert Burns’s epic poem ‘Tam O’ Shanter’. This was followed some years later by a stage play called Burns on the Solway, about the last weeks of the poet’s life. Both plays turned out to be as much about Jean Armour as they were about her famous husband, and that realisation prompted me to tackle a full-length novel. There is a vast amount of information about Robert out there but considerably less (and perhaps even more misinformation) about his wife. Too many Victorian scholars seem to have been content to maintain the fiction that in marrying Jean, a reasonably prosperous stonemason’s daughter, the poet was somehow marrying beneath him. Even Catherine Carswell in her controversial but supposedly ground-breaking 1930 Life of Robert Burns is content to describe Jean as a ‘young heifer’, while making invidious comparisons between Jean’s ‘homely and hearty willingness’ and Highland Mary’s ‘delicacy of spirit and a capacity for sacrifice to which Jean would always be a stranger.’ From a twenty-first-century perspective, and with all the benefit of detailed research focusing on Jean herself, it is clear that nothing could have been further from the truth.
The couple’s mutual attraction must have owed at least something to Jean’s superb singing voice, coupled with her intimate knowledge of the traditional songs of her country, handed down to her by her mother and her grandmother. Many of them were songs dealing with women’s preoccupations and predicaments, their joys and sorrows. Her husband said several times that she had the ‘finest wood-note wild’ in the country. When the poet came to design his personal seal, perched over all is a lark with ‘wood-note wild’ written above that, a motto which seems to refer to his abiding love for his wife. She supplied many of the traditional versions and even the melodies for some of her husband’s finest songs, magically reworked by a master of the art.
Put this together with the poet’s good humour and his willingness to empathise with the opposite sex (even when his behaviour didn’t match his apparent understanding) and you have the basis for an attachment that seems perfectly reasonable. Such an ability was a rare gift in an eighteenth-century man, especially one as rakish and charming, as essentially laddish as Rab, and goes some way towards explaining his singular charisma. If I could still feel the warm blast of it, more than two hundred years later, there was no hope for Jean, but there is every indication that the abiding affection was mutual.
For anyone who wants to take the subject of Robert and Jean further, to tease out the facts from the fiction, I have included a select bibliography. The field of ‘Burns Studies’ is vast and complicated, including many meticulously researched biographies and research papers. It is easy for the casual enquirer to grow weary of dry facts, chiels that winna ding, in Rab’s own words, lads that won’t be beaten, forgetting that we are talking about a fine and frequently emotional poet with a personal story so romantic that, were it to be invented by a novelist such as myself, it might well prove utterly incredible. From the time they first met, Jean was never absent from that story for very long.
In imagining late eighteenth-century Mauchline in particular, I owe a great deal to another fine writer, John Galt, in his beautifully crafted and occasionally hilarious early novel about rural Ayrshire life: Annals of the Parish, and to Professor Alan Riach for bringing Galt so vividly to life. Biographies of Burns are legion, and most are well researched and interesting, but for a readable, thought-provoking and scholarly exploration of Rab’s life, it would be hard to beat Robert Crawford’s The Bard. Nor is the author shy of expressing his opinion that Jean was better than her husband realised, or possibly even deserved. His account of the women in Rab’s life was particularly helpful to me. James Barke wrote an excellent and well informed series of novels about the life and times of Burns, but it is also worth seeking out his forthright and intelligent e
ssay on Burns’s bawdry in his 1959 edition of The Merry Muses of Caledonia, now updated by Valentina Bold.
Many old accounts of Burns’s life and times are available in digitised form, online or as print on demand volumes, including a fascinating account of Robert Burns at Mossgiel, with reminiscences of the poet, and incidentally of Jean, by his herd boy, Willie Patrick, published in 1881, but collected by William Jolly some years earlier. The best sources are, as ever, primary sources, the poet’s own work in particular. You should read the poems and songs, as well as Burns’s notes on them, for as vivid a depiction of eighteenth-century Ayrshire and Dumfriesshire – and the milieu in which Rab and Jean lived – as you will find anywhere. The poet’s letters are entertaining, intelligent, mercurial and occasionally explicit. Also worth consulting is the First Statistical Account for Mauchline for 1791–1799, written by the Reverend William ‘Daddie’ Auld himself. Extracts from the kirk session minutes of the 1780s are available online, and the Ayrshire History website (www.ayrshirehistory.com) is an excellent resource, with the Mauchline section containing a wealth of evocative old photographs that – with only a little imagination – allow the viewer to recreate the town as Rab and Jean must have known it.
With regard to Highland Mary Campbell, whom the Victorians in particular seemed to wish to idealise as the poet’s one true love, their liaison was surprisingly short-lived. There is, in fact, no proof that she was engaged as ‘wet nurse’ to Gavin Hamilton’s son, as she is in the novel, although it is true that she was employed as nursemaid in the Hamilton household for a scant few months, in between spells as dairymaid at Coilsfield. There is, however, a certain amount of evidence that she was conducting an illicit affair with Hugh Montgomerie’s younger brother James, who was definitely involved with Eleanora Maxwell Campbell at the same time.
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