Heaven Knows Who

by Christianna Brand

  For the joke about Grandpa courting Jess was now growing exceedingly thin. Jess herself had never for one instant entertained the idea, the whole thing had at first amused and now disgusted her; but James Fleming was apparently quite serious, and had been for a long time, and was becoming worse than a nuisance. He half lived in the kitchen and, in her own word, ‘tormented’ her with his attentions. Only a week before she died, when she was walking in the street, a friend, a Mrs Smith, had met her and thought her looking ill and depressed. She confessed that she was both. ‘You don’t know how I’m situated; I have a miserable life of it.’ She couldn’t get rid of the old man, she said, he made excuses to come down to the basement with the newspapers or ‘to make up the sugar and tea’, and she couldn’t be bothered with him any longer; it was making her ill. It wasn’t so bad when the family was at home, but as soon as they left her alone with him it was misery. He wouldn’t let her out of his sight, no one else was allowed into the house, and sooner than let her run round and buy so much as a cabbage he’d go out and get it himself. And she burst out suddenly and violently that he was an old wretch and an old devil.… ‘Why, what has he done to you?’ asked Mrs Smith, horrified and curious. But Jess wouldn’t tell. That there was something to tell she did not conceal, but she couldn’t speak of it in front of Mrs Smith’s husband. She promised to come round the following Sunday and confide it all to her, over a cup of tea.

  Several people testified later to the same sort of thing. Though half a dozen ex-servants were found to say they had never seen any signs in the old gentleman of ‘indecency’, most of them agreed that he was interfering and inquisitive and not seldom ‘tipsy’. One young lady who refrained from coming forward could have gone even further; for in the spring of 1852, he being then rising eighty by his present reckoning, he had been suddenly smitten by his conscience and made a voluntary confession to the Moderator and elders of his kirk that he had been guilty of the sin of fornication and had an illegitimate child by one Janet Dunsmore, a domestic servant. He was rebuked and admonished and then all was forgiven; for never had the witnesses seen so striking and edifying a display of remorse.

  Miss Dunsmore did not come forward at Jessie’s trial or at the subsequent enquiry, but Mary M’Kinnon, foster-sister of Jess, said again that Jess was tormented by the old man, that he was an old devil; the doorbell couldn’t ring without his poking his head out of his bedroom window, or coming downstairs, to find out what it was about and he was for ever hanging about her kitchen; her heart was broken with him, and when she’d completed this six months’ service she’d give in her notice. And to Elizabeth Halliday, at that time a fellow-servant with her at the house in Dunoon, she had said—as much as three years ago—that he was ‘a nasty body or a dirty body’; she had been left alone with him recently at Dunoon, and Elizabeth got the impression, though it was not openly stated, that he had been behaving indecently. She was surprised when Jess, having left to open her shop and the venture having failed, went back into the service of the Fleming family.

  By the summer of 1862, however, Jess had had enough of it. She was seriously thinking—perhaps because her child was there?—of emigrating to Australia.

  Jessie had not been round to Sandyford Place for a couple of weeks. The fact of the matter was that she had pawned her cloak. She was, as ever, weighed down by money troubles, and £4 19s in arrears with her rent. She paid 5s a week, quarterly, for her ‘house’ and had to be constantly dunned for it—though dunned may be too hard a word, for the agents obviously liked her and were sorry for her and made things as easy as they could: a kindly fabrication had even been built up allowing her to believe that she had still two months’ grace before she must settle. But the rent was not all; and now even her cloak was in pawn and, though the weather was fine, it was still early in July and, delicate as she was, she could not go out at night without it. She wanted to leave her visit till late: if she went too early the old man would still be up and they couldn’t talk freely before him—last time she and her husband had gone there together, though Jess had taken them into her own room, he followed them there and resolutely sat them out. She would leave it till ten, by which time he should have gone off to bed. But it meant that she must have her cloak. She got hold of Mary Adams, who was in the house that morning doing some washing for the lodger, Mrs Campbell, and asked her to go to the pawn for her. She gave her a dressing glass and told her to ask for six shillings on it, ‘lift’ the cloak out of pawn and come back with the change. So off went Mrs Adams and returned triumphantly with the cloak and one and fourpence ha’penny left over.

  Mrs M’Lachlan, thanking her, explained that she wanted the cloak to go round and see Jess, by whom Mary Adams understood Jess M’Pherson, whom she herself knew very well. Nor was she surprised when Mrs M’Lachlan explained that she was going late to try to avoid the old man. And by the way, she added, would Mary Adams drop in on her way home at the locksmith’s at the foot of Carrick Street and ask him to call round for the check key to the front door—it would have to be repaired, the door wouldn’t open from the outside without it, and she didn’t like troubling Mrs Campbell all the time to open it to her. Oh, and could Mrs Adams come in and sit with the child while she was out that evening?—she would only be an hour or so.

  Mary Adams agreed, but by half-past nine she had not turned up, nor had the smith arrived. (Mrs Adams had in fact forgotten all about him). Mrs M’Lachlan was not unduly worried by her non-arrival. Mrs Campbell was easy and good-natured and would let her in when she got back from Jess’s, which shouldn’t be later than eleven; and if the boy woke and cried while she was out, would go along and hush him to sleep again. She tucked him up in bed and put on her cloak and began to tie the strings, of her bonnet.…

  It was a ‘drab-coloured’ velvet bonnet, a sort of rather dull light brown; and the cloak was light grey. Beneath it she wore a dark brown coberg gown—a fine wool or wool-and-cotton mixture, rather like cashmere—with a trimmed bodice and, round its crinolined skirt, two flounces. It was only her well-worn everyday going-out gown; but within a few days it was to become one of the two most talked about dresses in all England and Scotland. The other was cinnamon coloured trimmed with blue velvet and had no flounces.

  As she stood there tying up her bonnet someone knocked at the front door. Mrs Campbell, who was getting ready for bed, went and answered it; her preparations apparently did not include undressing, so no doubt she did not keep the visitors waiting. She probably thought it was her own lodger, the sailor, John Mac-Donald; but it wasn’t, it was a Mrs Fraser, a friend of Jessie’s, with her two children. Mrs Campbell showed them down to the room at the end of the corridor and went and got back into bed.

  Jessie was happy enough to see Christina Fraser, but she was already rather pressed for time. A friend’s child was ill and she had been remiss in not enquiring after it and had intended calling in on her way to Sandyford Place. She was rather late already; and besides she had meant to beg a small favour. Her sister Ann was, like Jess, contemplating emigrating to Australia and the sick child’s father, James M’Gregor, was in a position to write her a certificate of good character. However, so was Mrs Fraser, who had known them all from their childhood, and that would do instead. Mrs Fraser was happy to oblige and sat down with pen and paper. But Jessie had no envelopes and she went along to Mrs Campbell’s room and asked if Mrs Campbell’s daughter would mind running round to the post office for her and getting some. (They seem to have kept late hours in the Broomielaw. It was after half-past nine, but a three-year-old child had only just been put to bed, Mrs Fraser with her children was out visiting, far from home, Jessie herself had not yet even started out; and the local post office was still open for the sale of envelopes).

  Mrs Campbell was, as we have seen already—fully dressed—in bed. The girl went off for the envelopes and duly came back with them; and meanwhile Mrs M’Lachlan went across to what in fact was the kitchen cupboard and took out an empty glass bottle which
belonged to Mrs Campbell. She said nothing to its owner about it, but it was, after all, only an empty bottle and she probably gave no thought as to whose it was. With this in her hand and carrying a little black basket, borrowed from Mrs Campbell, she called to Tommy Fraser and together they went round the corner to a shop in Argyle Street for ‘a dram’ to offer to her guest. A gill and a half of rum was measured out into the bottle, at a cost of sevenpence ha’penny; she would give Mrs Fraser a glass and have a drop with her and then take the rest round to Jess. She bought a few biscuits to go with the rum and, having been out only a few minutes, she and Tommy went back to the house. Mrs Fraser was waiting for them and let them in, not troubling Mrs Campbell again.

  Mrs Fraser had meanwhile been struggling with the certificate; but she ‘could not please herself with it’, and indeed we all know the difficulties of writing recommendations of our friends. She suggested at last that she should take it home and think it over, and that Jessie should call the following evening for the finished result. This was agreed to and they drank their rum and had a little gossip, and then it really was time to be going—though the certificate was no longer required of him, Jessie still intended to call in on Mr M’Gregor and ask after his child. So off they went, the four of them together, Jessie carrying the little black basket with the rest of the rum and the biscuits. Mrs Campbell, hearing them go, wondered, no doubt a little ruefully, what time her landlady would be back—Mrs M’Lachlan was always talking about having the check key attended to but it never seemed to get done, and Mrs Campbell would have to get up when she did return and open the door for her. Moreover, her own lodger, MacDonald, wasn’t in yet, and he too would have to be admitted. Perhaps Mrs Campbell had some reason after all for keeping her clothes on when she went to bed.

  But as it happened, she was not very much disturbed that night. MacDonald came in at about eleven and went to his room; and from then on Mrs Campbell lay fast asleep.

  When she did wake it was to hear Mrs M’Lachlan’s little boy crying. As he did not stop she got up and went along to the end room to find out if anything was wrong. The child was alone. She picked him up and comforted him, gave him ‘a piece’—i.e. something to eat—and put him back to sleep in his mother’s bed: being Mrs Campbell, she first fully dressed him. He went off at once and she returned to her room, but as she went she examined the front door to see that it was still safely locked. It was just as she had left it after admitting her lodger, MacDonald, at eleven.

  She glanced out of the window. A bonny clear morning; and the hands of the big clock in the Broomielaw standing at half-past five.

  Three and a half hours later Jessie M’Lachlan came home, and now she was wearing, not her own dark brown coberg dress but a cinnamon-coloured merino—which had belonged to Jess.

  1 Washington Street is now largely taken up by the warehouses of a whisky distillery. In wet weather there is a constant drip from the roof. The author stood under this hopefully for some time, but it was only rain water.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Friday, July 4, 1862, and ‘a bonny clear night’.

  Jessie went off up the Broomielaw with her friends: turned right up Washington Street to the point where Stobcross Street, running at an angle into Argyle Street, forms a ‘gushet’. It would take them ten minutes, perhaps, with a further ten minutes to go on past the Gushet House (this no longer stands), up North Street to Sauchiehall Street and Sandyford Place. She had evidently changed her mind about calling in on the M’Gregors, for they did not see her that night. At the corner of Stobcross Street she said good night to Mrs Fraser and the children, and here, crossing the street towards the Gushet House, she fades away into the evening and out of our sight—the slight, frail figure in the brown bonnet and light grey cloak over the dark brown crinolined dress, one hand holding the little black basket with the rum and the biscuits for Jess: walking away in the twilight of a summer’s evening from home and friends and such happiness as she knew into a blackness of horror and mystery as deep and dark as the night was bright and fair.

  It was ten minutes past ten.

  No. 17 Sandyford Place is one of twenty-eight houses that form part of Sauchiehall Street—the road has been uphill all the way from the Broomielaw and now we are well above the Clyde. Numbers twenty-eight to sixteen have gardens running down to the street, but at No. 18 a driveway sweeps in, railed off from the street, emerging again at the end of the ‘place’. No. 17 is therefore second last of this row, with no front garden, and only the pavement, the drive, a little patch of grass and the railings between it and Sauchiehall Street1. It is nowadays a medical research centre, its back garden built over, and painted a sombre grey—a solid two-storeyed house with a basement, not by any means too large for the seven or eight people who in 1862 inhabited it—especially as the mistress of the house was John Fleming’s sister, who would presumably occupy a room to herself. The servants’ bedroom and the kitchen offices were in the basement, the dining-room, a small parlour and one bedroom at ground level, and the drawing-room and probably three smallish bedrooms on the top floor. Jess M’Pherson slept in the basement, the unfortunate John junior was obliged to share his grandfather’s room—and, indeed, bed—on the ground floor; the rest sorted themselves out upstairs.

  Half a dozen steps ran up to the front door, forming an arch over an area. The door led into a wide vestibule; the dining-room door was to your right as you entered, its two large windows looking out on to Sandyford Place. Ahead of you on the left were the stairs leading up to the top floor; where they started, the vestibule narrowed into a passage. Off this, behind the dining-room, there was a small parlour, its door facing the top of the stairs leading down to the basement. At the end of the passage directly opposite the front door was old Mr Fleming’s bedroom, which he shared with young John. The windows of this room and of the parlour were therefore in the back wall of the house: they looked over a walled garden, long and narrow, with a wash-house and coal shed at the end, and a door—kept locked—leading out into a lane. This door had no knocker or bell.

  Going down to the basement, the stairs took a turn to the left at the bottom and landed you in a wide-ish passage, between two doors, facing you. The one to your right led into Jess M’Pherson’s bedroom, under the dining-room; the one to your left into the kitchen, beneath the back parlour. Under old Fleming’s bedroom there was a smaller room where he kept his possessions, presumably leaving the upstairs wardrobe accommodation to John. The windows of this room and of the kitchen looked on to the walled garden behind the house, and between them a narrow passage ran down to the back door.

  The windows of Jess M’Pherson’s room looked out on to Sandyford Place—or rather into the area. Next to this room, under the arched bridge formed by the front doorsteps across the area was the pantry. It had a window with iron bars, forming a sort of small gate into the area, into which was let a smaller window. This gate was the only way you could get into the area, and there was no way up out of the area—which of course was railed—into Sandyford Place.

  This, then, was the house which Jessie set out to visit on the Friday night. It was a house she knew well, having lived there herself as a servant. She had left the Broomielaw at a little before ten; she would arrive, if she ever arrived there at all, at about twenty minutes past.

  P.C. Campbell was patrolling his beat. He passed Sandyford Place perhaps once in an hour or so, but his orders were to concentrate mainly on a patch of waste ground where the drunks and prostitutes were ‘bothersome’. If there were comings and goings that night in Sandyford Place and the lane behind it, P.C. Campbell saw nothing of them at all.

  At eleven o’clock, Mr Littlejohn, who kept a liquor shop at the top of North Street, four or five minutes’ walk from 17 Sandyford Place, closed his door and went off upstairs to bed.

  A few minutes before that—there was a little dispute about the time here, but from the evidence it would appear that it was just before eleven—a Mrs Walker went out into Elderslie
Street to take a breath of fresh air. Mrs Walker was in the family way and feeling not too well. She was expecting her husband home at any moment and thought she would wait at their ‘close-mouth’ till he arrived; or it may well be that she simply thought she might have a gossip with a neighbour—Mrs Walker was to show herself adept at inventing little excuses of this kind. She suggests, for example, that as she was innocently passing the house of the neighbour, Miss Dykes, Miss Dykes popped out and opened a conversation with her and then came out on to the pavement and stood gossiping with her; Miss Dykes, however, says simply ‘It was at her request that I came out of my house and stood talking.’

  Both Mrs Walker and Miss Dykes were proprietresses of shops in Elderslie Street and they both knew Jess M’Pherson. Miss Dykes had seen her that very evening, when she came in between six and seven for some washing powder. Jess had never said anything to her against old Mr Fleming, and Miss Dykes thought she had no appearance of being unhappy at No. 17: she had spoken with respect of John Fleming, his son. But one evening about a month ago she had come into the shop just as someone was leaving it after—unsuccessfully—trying to borrow money from Miss Dykes; and Miss Dykes had passed the remark to Miss M’Pherson that some people seemed to think one was made of money. Jess doubtless said the equivalent of ‘are you telling me?’ She said it was a bad thing to lend money, she herself had money owing from two different people and she couldn’t get it back. Miss Dykes suggested it was a funny thing if Mr Fleming, who was a ‘writer’—an accountant—couldn’t fix that for her, and Jess said she didn’t dare tell Mr Fleming. Once before she had confided in him, and he had reproved her for lending money to fellow-servants and had kept back the money from the other woman’s wages till it was repaid. She said that she was now owed four pounds by a former servant who had been married out of the house, and when she had asked it back she got the height of abuse, but she was going to ask again, come what would.…