The Tobacco Lords Trilogy

by Margaret Thomson-Davis

  ‘You know, Ramsay,’ Halyburton boomed out, ‘Jock Currie would see the funny side of that.’

  Ramsay pulled at his nose.

  ‘Aye. I can just hear him from the other side. “Well, it didn’t take you rascals long to forget me!” ‘

  Halyburton’s laugh rumbled up from a mountainous body.

  ‘Poor auld Jock!’

  ‘Nothing poor about him. It’s a blessing the Lord gathered him. He’s well out of it.’

  ‘True. There’ll be no Highlanders up in heaven to bother him.’

  ‘I wish we could be sure of that, Willie. But God is the Great Forgiver. Maybe he’ll think a few of them have said their prayers well enough.’

  ‘Fiddlesticks! Not even the Lord God could understand their Gaelic jabber!’ He gave his cauliflower wig a chug to straighten it. ‘Would you no’ like to come along and take pot-luck with me and my family?’

  He turned and made a signal to a bevy of ladies following at some distance behind.

  ‘Come away, come away. Put a jerk on there!’

  Turning back, he addressed Ramsay again. ‘It’s my lassies I’m worried about.’

  Ramsay thumped his Malacca cane on the ground as he strode along.

  ‘I’ve had much soul-searching these past weeks about why I didn’t join the Volunteers.’

  ‘Damn it, man. Where would you be now if you had? In bloody Edinburgh.’

  ‘Aye,’ Ramsay agreed. ‘Better to be in Glasgow.’

  ‘Any time, Ramsay. Any time.’

  ‘Somebody’s got to keep the wheels turning.’

  ‘The Provost’s done his best. We’ve all done our best. It was us that drummed up two battalions, six hundred men in each, remember.’

  ‘Aye. The Pretender and his rebels are going to love us for that.’ Ramsay’s mouth twisted. ‘Glasgow’s always been his verra favourite place. Especially after us being just as quick to do the same to his father.’

  ‘And were we no’ right?’

  ‘Of course. Of course. What I’m angry at is the way the English have handled the whole campaign and how they’ve rewarded our loyalty.’ He spat to one side.

  ‘My God, Willie, the rebels marched a hundred and fifty miles into hostile territory in terrible weather and in the face of two armies capable of annihilating them. But they’ve no’ been annihilated, have they? Even yet the Highlanders keep turning and beating them. Out of five thousand I hear they’ve only lost forty men and that’s with sickness and everything else included. The trouble is the English are too afraid of them.’

  ‘Weel, weel, Ramsay, they’re a fearsome sight for somebody who has never clapped eyes on them before. It’s a wee bit different for us having had a few come doon to Glasgow every year as cattle drovers. We’ve seen a few of them at the markets.’

  ‘Aye.’ Ramsay nodded and slid his friend a sarcastic look. ‘We’ve seen a few of them.’

  * * *

  Nancy the maid kicked open Annabella Ramsay’s door to reveal Annabella in nothing but red silk stockings and silver garters from which dangled purple tassels. Beside her was a young man busily unbuttoning his breeches.

  Leaning her back against the door lintel, hands on hips, Nancy surveyed the scene.

  If she had been caught having a naked frolic with a man she would be whipped through the town or, at best, pilloried at the church and made to stand Sunday after Sunday in a sackcloth gown with a card proclaiming her sin hanging round her neck.

  Life was so damned unfair. Why should she be kicked about and have nothing to look forward to in life but washing floors and emptying chamber-pots and dancing attendance to a spoiled mistress like Annabella? She was as clever as her and as beautiful. Indeed, if she could dress in flattering gowns like Annabella she would look even more striking than her. Despite the shabby petticoats, many a gentleman’s attention had already strayed in her direction and more than once a pretty compliment had been paid to her black hair, her violet eyes and her shapely figure. She was taller than Annabella and more voluptuous.

  Staring derisively at Annabella’s apple buttocks and breasts, she said:

  ‘He’s coming.’

  Annabella squealed.

  ‘It can’t be Papa. He said he was going to the tavern after the funeral. He’s always there for hours.’

  ‘Expecting somebody else?’

  ‘You impudent wretch.’ Annabella stamped her foot, making the tassels dance a jig. ‘Don’t just stand there. Help me to dress.’ She flapped her hands at the young man. ‘Away with you. Away with you!’

  But already he was hopping out, tugging on his shoes with one hand and striving to plunge the other into his coat sleeve.

  Nancy scooped up the low-bodied petticoat and Annabella clung round her neck to balance herself as she hopped into it.

  ‘Losh sake,’ she wailed.

  ‘Hold still till I fasten it.’

  ‘Hell and damnation.’

  ‘Now the hoops.’

  ‘They’ll bump into one another on the stairs.’

  ‘I warned you, mistress. Come on, here’s the skirt.’

  ‘Damnation! It’s monstrous of Papa to come so soon. Was ever a poor female in a more distressed situation?’

  ‘He’ll nab you yet. Take a grip of your fan.’

  The outside door banged and Ramsay’s heavy tread approached the bedroom.

  ‘Young Robin Bicker’s just hared past me on the stairs.’

  Annabella worked hard at her fan to cool her crimson perspiring face while at the same time attempting to appear wide-eyed and innocent.

  ‘Annabella, has he been here?’

  ‘Yes Papa. Looking for our Douglas. I told him if he found Griselle Halyburton that’s where he’d find my brother, silly lovesick fool that he is.’

  Ramsay studied her thoughtfully.

  ‘Willie Halyburton has invited us to supper.’ He jerked a thumb towards the wig perched on its stand in the corner. ‘Get your head on.’

  ‘Och, papa, can I not go the way I am? Is my own yellow hair not devilishly bonny?’ She tossed her head, making her long curls fly out and over her shoulders.

  ‘Enough of that. You’re about as vain as your brother and fine you know Mrs Halyburton’s a stickler for the proprieties.’

  ‘To hell with Mrs Halyburton and the proprieties.’

  ‘Watch your wicked tongue. You’re needing a good bleeding, my girl. Or a Sunday on the cutty stool. Have you been learning your Catechisms like I told you?’

  ‘Yes, Papa.’

  ‘What is the Chief End of Man?’

  ‘Man’s Chief End is to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever, Papa.’

  ‘What rule hath God given to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy Him?’

  ‘The word of God which is contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments is the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy Him, Papa.’

  ‘Aye, well …’ Ramsay said. ‘Just you keep that in mind. Now do as you’re bid or you’ll stop here until bedtime copying out every testament in the Bible.’

  Annabella flounced round, her skirt seesawing. She hated wearing a wig. It was a fiendish nuisance. After a while it felt like an iron pot full of boiling water on her head. It inhibited movement too. Having her own hair built up was not quite so irksome. And she had such pretty hair. Once it was brushed up all round and secured firmly over some padding it looked more attractive than any wig, especially when it was decorated with bunches of curls on top and strings of beads.

  Her father said, ‘I’ll tell Big John to get the lanthorns ready.’

  ‘Am I not to have a sedan-chair, Papa?’

  ‘It’s a fine dry night.’

  ‘But the streets are filthy. My shoes and skirts will be ruined.

  ‘Wear your pattens to keep you up off the ground then. I’m not wasting money on a sedan-chair on a night like this when we’re just going along the road for a bite of supper.’

  Annabella pouted. It would be no than
ks to her father if she captured a husband. Men were afraid that her father was too mean to supply a decent dowry. She hated his dour face, his melancholy prayers and his boring Bible readings. She longed to be away in a house of her own with a man of her own; a gay dashing devilish rake of a man.

  With a sigh she crumpled on to a chair and allowed Nancy to fit the wig on. There was not much chance of such a man being at the Halyburtons’. Mrs Halyburton’s son Andrew was fat and short-sighted and always had an itch or a cough or a snuffly cold, or all three. She wished the soldiers would hurry back to town. It was deadly dull without them. She felt unbearably restless. Unsatisfied emotions careered wildly about inside her.

  ‘Losh sake, Nancy. You’re so slow I could scream. That’ll do. Give me my cloak.’

  Ignoring Annabella’s command, Nancy took her time finishing arranging some curls on the wig. Often she took a perverse pleasure in being awkward and causing irritation to Annabella. To be excruciatingly slow and subtly impertinent gave her a strange sense of power over the other woman.

  ‘What’s all your rush?’

  Suddenly Annabella giggled.

  ‘I’ve a secret assignment with Willie Halyburton. After supper we’re going to steal through to the kitchen and fornicate in front of the fire.’

  ‘You’re fit for it.’

  Annabella’s giggles whooped into laughter. ‘Aye, but Willie Halyburton’s not. Although no doubt he’d like to. I can’t imagine him getting much joy from his cold fish of a wife.’

  Her spirits never sagged for long and with energetic bouncy step, despite the weight and height of her wig, she joined her father and they followed Nancy and Big John from the house. The servants each held a horn lamp in front of them. The lanterns were lit by smoky tallow candles and their flickering light sent shadows leaping like giants in the stair. Once out on Saltmarket Street Annabella picked her way with more care. The iron-ringed and wooden-soled pattens that protected her dainty green shoes crunched and clanged into lumps of frozen earth and dung. They turned into Trongate Street and crossed to the opposite side so that they could walk more easily along the plainstanes. But once past the Tolbooth and the Exchange their feet wobbled once again over dirt and around dunghills. Annabella screwed up her nose and agitated her fan. Obviously Stinky Rab, who was supposed to clean the streets every night, had, as usual, not done a very good job.

  ‘These streets are a disgrace,’ she called out as loudly as she could, knowing it would annoy Nancy, who was ashamed of Stinky Rab and her other brother, Daft Jamie. Daft Jamie always followed Stinky Rab’s cart and foraged amongst the rubbish and ate cockroaches and beetles.

  ‘I’m sure they haven’t been cleaned for a week. Some people are just too lazy and stupid to do a job properly.’

  Ramsay glowered round at her. ‘Hold your tongue.’

  ‘But it’s true, isn’t it, Papa?’

  ‘I’m not deaf. Enough of your ranting and raving. Try to act like a lady for once.’

  She longed to smite him with one furious blow, but knew better than to try it. Once she had struck him in a temper and had the blow immediately returned and with such force it had felled her to the ground and knocked her wig off. Afterwards she had been imprisoned with him in her room, forced to kneel with him in solemn prayer. ‘Forgive us our wicked passions, Lord God Almighty, chastise us, stay our hand …’ The praying had gone on for hours and had been worse than anything else.

  She relieved her feelings by throwing her fan at Nancy and rejoiced that it clipped her on the back of the head. Big John, grinning through the darkness, picked it up and gave it back to her. Nancy never even flinched or turned round and Annabella hated her. Often she suspected that if Ramsay had any feelings for anyone they were for Nancy rather than his own flesh and blood.

  The lanterns intensified the gloom rather than relieved it. Glasgow was devilish black but not silent. From deep in tenement buildings came muffled sounds of revelry; faint screeches of laughter, sudden swells of busy talk, scraping of fiddles and rhythmic thumping of feet. The great bell in the college tower donged to mark nine o’clock and the end of the students’ day.

  Annabella wondered about all the life and merriment going on behind the muffling wall of darkness. She longed to be part of it. Sometimes she felt she would die of the restrictions of mind and body her father subjected her to. As far as her father was concerned her only recreation ought to be the earnest studying of the Bible. He had read to her from that book so often she was sure that one day she would have the whole thing off by heart. If they weren’t reading the Bible they were praying, and, oh, what long and melancholy prayers they were. Surely God must be bored to distraction by now. She certainly was.

  The Halyburtons lived above their warerooms and entry had to be made through an archway, alongside one of the warerooms and into a close at the back. The close led to a turnpike stairway hardly wide enough to take Big John’s shoulders.

  ‘Make way for my lady and gentleman!’ he called to the tightly packed human debris on the stairs. It shrank back and snaked upwards into the shadows in front of him.

  Annabella held her nose with one dainty hand and manoeuvred her hoops sideways with the other until she reached the first landing and Willie Halyburton’s door. It was opened by their young maid Nell whose pale face and hazel eyes looked sly in the shifting light. Their old maid Kate, who was jealous of Nell, came bustling from behind her, piercing the darkness with her shrill voice.

  ‘Come awa’ in. Come awa’ in.’ Then, with a punch at Nell, ‘Do ye no’ even ken how to make folk welcome?’

  Annabella swept past Kate with much swishing and rustling of satin. She could never understand how Mrs Halyburton could thole having such an ugly old crone in the house. Kate was a hunchback with bald patches in her hair and eyes that were nasty slits in layers of tough leathery wrinkles and a nose that was huge with a black wart on the tip.

  The Halyburtons had a dining-room but this was never aired and seldom used except if extra special company were coming from a distance. Normally they just entertained in the bedroom like everybody else.

  Annabella envied Mrs Halyburton’s bedroom. It had a four-poster bed with orange and gold damask curtains and the walls and the ceilings had remnants of old paintings and designs on them. By the light of the candelabra on the table she could discern rich shades of blue and green and purple and yellow and red-brown.

  Mrs Letitia Halyburton came forward to greet them with rigidly straight back and hands clasped primly beneath a long bosom. ‘Aye,’ she said with a nod, ‘Mr Ramsay. Mistress Annabella.’

  Annabella flounced down in as low a curtsy as her wig permitted with much fluttering and swooping of arms and fan.

  ‘Madam.’

  Despite the enthusiastic curtsy, or perhaps because of it, Mrs Halyburton pressed her lips tightly together in disapproval. Devil take her, Annabella thought, and turned her attention to the other occupants of the room. There were no young men, she noticed with acute disappointment, except her own brother Douglas and the Halyburtons’ son Andrew. Fat, short-sighted, messy Andrew; scratchy, eye-blinking, breathless little bore. She swept towards him with head in the air and arm outstretched. His white cauliflower wig bent low over her hand as he kissed it, his spectacles clinging to the tip of his nose.

  ‘A terrible time we’re having, Annabella, eh? A terrible time.’

  ‘Indeed we are, Andrew,’ she agreed, not having the slightest idea of what he was talking about. He was always grumbling and wheezing on about something.

  He scratched his head, his cheek, his neck.

  ‘Would you take a pinch of snuff with me?’

  ‘That would be a prodigious pleasure.’ She frisked her weight from one foot to the other and stretched out her arm again. While Andrew searched for his snuffbox she admired her fine creamy skin and the silver lace drifting down from her elbows and her neat wrist with its silver bangles. All wasted on fat fumbling Andrew, who was hopelessly in love with Sukie, the
daughter of the Earl of Locheid who lived upstairs. At last he found the snuffbox and managed to convey a pinch from it on to the back of her hand and then a pinch on to his own.

  ‘Losh, Andrew, that’s a handsome snuffbox you’ve got there.’

  He indulged in a rapid scratch behind his ear.

  ‘I had it made special and I was thinking of getting Lady Sukie one made the very same.’

  ‘She’ll be uncommonly pleased. I’m sure.’

  With graceful sweeping gestures they both swung their arms inwards, sniffed daintily from the backs of their hands, then snuffed and heaved and jerked and sneezed in wild abandon.

  Annabella dabbed at her face with a lace-edged handkerchief.

  ‘And where is Sukie tonight, Andrew?’ But before he could answer, old Kate the maid screeched from the doorway:

  ‘The supper’s on the table. Will ye a’ sit doon and no’ waste it? I canna stand guid food being wasted.’

  The old manservant, Tam Bogle, pushed past her.

  ‘Away to your place in the kitchen, woman. You ken fine it’s my job to see to the table.’ Then, turning his attention to the company: ‘Weel, ye heard what she said. Sit doon!’

  The table was resplendent with, on one side, a haunch of venison and a baked pudding, in the middle, partridges and larks, and along the other side veal collops.

  Mrs Halyburton issued sharp orders.

  ‘Mistress Annabella—you here beside Andrew. Mr Ramsay over there between Mistress Griselle and Mistress Phemy.’ She flicked an impatient fan at her two daughters and they hurried to take their chairs. Then she nodded towards her husband. ‘The gudeman at the top of the table.’ Another flick alerted Douglas. ‘You at Mistress Griselle’s other side.’ Gratefully he obeyed. ‘And you, Glendinny,’ she favoured the Earl with a small smile, ‘beside me, sir. And your gudewife at my other side.’

  Lady Glendinny was a skinny waxy woman like a long candle that was slowly melting down.

  ‘My faither used to say about our auld maid, “For the first ten years she was an excellent servant. For the next ten years she was a good mistress but the third ten years she was a perfect tyrant.” ’