Annabella shrugged and helped herself to a piece of gingerbread.
‘I dare say he’s been out on rainy days before.’
‘Eat up, boys.’ Griselle gazed fondly at George then patted his head. ‘Have another biscuit, Geordie.’
‘Yes, Mama.’ George waited until the grown-ups weren’t looking before popping a whole biscuit into his mouth. Mungo chuckled in appreciation at the bulging-eyed antics of his long-necked cousin. Then he followed suit by stuffing a whole biscuit into his mouth. Unfortunately, everyone’s attention was on him when he did it. Annabella gave him a smart clip across his face that left one ear scarlet and stinging and made bits of biscuit all but choke him by jerking down his throat. George could hardly contain his giggles.
‘I must ask you to remember your manners, sir,’ Annabella said. ‘You put me quite out of countenance with your behaviour.’
‘When is he starting the school?’ Griselle inquired.
‘I’ll take him on Monday. I was giving him the chance to see Glasgow first so that he could find his way around and not get lost.’
‘Aye, bairns are disappearing too often these days and it’s not with getting lost. They’re kidnapped by beggars and gypsies.’
Mungo glowered.
‘Beggars or gypsies better not dare touch me. I’ll soon send them packing with a flea in their ear.’
Douglas nibbled at a biscuit, his scarlet lips puckering greasily.
‘Dear sister. He sounds just like you.’
‘He’ll be none the worse for that, sir.’
Griselle went to the door and called to her maid to come and light a candle.
‘See how dark it’s getting already,’ she remarked returning to her seat by the fire. ‘You’re always welcome, as you know, Annabella, but you were very foolish to come today. You haven’t even brought a lantern.’
Douglas fluttered his handkerchief under his nose.
‘I will, of course, give you the use of a lantern, Annabella, but I regret I cannot accompany you safely home. Not in, my condition. I feel like the ghost of a dead dog.’
‘Oh, good gracious alive!’ Annabella laughed. ‘We live in the same street. I just need to point the horse in the right direction. There’s no danger of passing our close either because there’s always candles and lanterns in the windows and the Old Coffee House lighting up the entrance.’
Mungo and George went over to the other side of the room to play and their recurrent laughter made a pleasant background.
‘That’s a particularly handsome likeness of you.’ Annabella gazed up at the portrait of Griselle that hung above the mantelpiece. It was very serious, of course, but then Griselle seldom smiled.
Griselle tutted in annoyance.
‘I wish I’d worn my cherry velvet instead of that lavender silk.’
‘You suit the lavender gown very well. Tell me, what kind of dancing assemblies have you been having? Is the Widow Aberdour still hale and hearty?’
‘Haven’t you heard?’ Griselle jerked her chair closer in preparation for an enjoyable gossip.
The fire’s scarlet glow reflected on the three figures grouped round it. It sent port wine shadows smoothing out behind them as they talked undisturbed by the candles slowly nodding their yellow heads in the draught at the other side of the room.
At last Annabella said,
‘Papa will be home soon and expecting his supper. I had better go. Is it still raining, do you think?’
Griselle jerked her head towards the window.
‘Listen to it. It’s coming down harder than ever.’
‘Ah, well!’ Annabella bounced lightly to her feet snapping shut her fan. ‘There’s no use moping about it. Mungo, get your breeches on and look sharp about it.’
‘Och, Mother …’
‘Mungo!’
‘If the child wants to stay, let him,’ Griselle said. ‘He’ll be company for George and it’s a pity for him to get soaked again.’
Annabella hesitated.
‘Please, please, Aunt Annabella,’ George pleaded, bulging-eyed and thin-necked like a fragile young giraffe.
‘Oh, all right.’
The boys hopped about hugging one another in delight while Griselle called to the maid to bring Annabella’s cloak and a lantern.
‘I’ll bring it back tomorrow,’ Annabella said, ‘and I can collect Mungo at the same time.’
‘Very well. Tell your father I was asking kindly for him.’
Douglas dropped a kiss on Annabella’s brow.
‘And you will explain to him about my regrettable indisposition, won’t you, dear saucebox?’
‘I will do my best.’
They carried candles with them to see her to the front door and then, before she said goodbye and stepped out onto the pitch black landing, Douglas lit the lantern for her with one of the candles.
‘Goodbye, Mungo,’ she called just before the door closed behind her.
The lantern-light seesawing back and forth revealed huddles of ragged people crouched in corners neither sleeping nor talking. She picked her way down the stairs to where she could hear her horse nervously whinnying. Then suddenly, just as she reached the last few steps, she was astonished to feel water lapping at her ankles. It seemed incredible that it could have rained so much while she had been with Douglas and Griselle. She had an urge to hasten back up and tell them but she controlled the impulse. After all, there was nothing Douglas or Griselle could do. And it would only make them worry about her all the more.
Her shoes and stockings would be ruined, not to mention her petticoats before she even reached the horse but once mounted she would manage home all right. Hitching up her skirts at the same time as trying to keep a grip of the lantern, she gingerly descended the remaining steps.
Outside of Glasgow, Donald McPhee, the shepherd, peered from his cottage window. The cottage was perched on top of a steep bank on one side of the river. Across the other side were the fields in which his sheep grazed and rising from them the hills that encircled the whole valley. The river snaked this way and that, sometimes looping around clusters of trees that dipped low across the water as if they were drinking from it. Sometimes it disappeared among the overlapping bulk of the hills. But tonight Donald saw by the light of the moon and by the occasional flash of lightning that the river had no shape any more. All the land glittered darkly with water.
‘I’d better try and get the sheep across,’ he told his wife.
She wrapped her plaid over her head and round her shoulders and lifted the lantern without saying anything.
Immediately they stepped outside the wind attacked them, tugging and tearing at their clothes like a mad dog and pelting them with rain, spasmodically, viciously.
‘Hold the lantern up,’ Donald roared in competition with the high-pitched raving of the wind and the echoing cracks of thunder.
The lantern’s puny flicker did little to help guide them to the path that led down to the bridge. But clouds scudding across the moon sent flashes of silver to light up the narrow wooden structure and the swollen river foaming across it. Over at the other side sheep were standing knee deep in water bleating miserably. The bridge shivered under Donald’s feet and, keeping a cautious hold of the hand rail, he forced a path across it.
On the other side he waded over to where the sheep were bunched. But as soon as he reached them and made to grab one they all scattered out in panic. Cursing, he splashed forward and made another lunge. This time he managed to get a grip of one and haul it back. Floundering about he at last succeeded in lifting the struggling animal and stumbled with it towards the bridge.
The return journey was even worse. He couldn’t get a grip of the rail because of the weight of the struggling animal he was carrying but he managed to stagger back and fling the sheep down. His wife then chased it up the bank onto the high road behind the cottage. Stopping to regain his breath, he returned for the next one.
To and fro he went until his clothes hung heavy o
n him with water and the river like a monster raged louder and louder over the bridge and round his legs. Each time he went back to the meadow the water there seemed deeper, making his task more difficult.
It was on one of his return journeys that he thought he saw his wife waving and signalling to him. He thought he heard her shouting too. But he could not be certain. It could have been the wind playing tricks with her plaid, and giving one of its highpitched screeches. Then, before he could think any more, a towering wall of water, grotesquely spiked with tree-trunks, thundered on top of him. He was engulfed in a crescendo of noise. The bridge flew from beneath his feet. He was plunged into the torrent to be whirled and tossed about and rushed along with the flotsam and the flood towards the town.
Adam Ramsay had retreated to the stairs of his counting house where he stood moodily waiting for his clerk to bring one of the small boats tied down by the riverside. He wondered if the water had reached Saltmarket Street and seeped into cellars and warehouses and ruined the tobacco and other precious commodities stored there. Something would have to be done about the river. It would have to be deepened, dykes would have to be built, some way would have to be found to prevent flooding of the southern streets of the city.
Usually it never reached as far as his home and warehouse at the Trongate corner of Saltmarket Street. But his counting house, the other buildings in the Briggait and those at the foot of Stockwell and Saltmarket Street had been awash more than once before. And many a cow and sheep had been drowned on the Green. One or two humans as well.
He thumped his hands behind his back and thrust his bewigged head aggressively forward. Where was that fool of a clerk? It was getting dark and not a candle lit to guide his path down the stairs. Water kept lapping gently, monotonously.
‘Sanny Crompton!’ he suddenly shouted. ‘Where the hell are you? I didn’t send you to build the bloody boat!’
‘Coming, maister, coming,’ a distraught voice answered. ‘But it’s no’ easy. It’s worse than you think out here. There’s a wind birling me about like a peerie.’
‘You’ve oars, haven’t you?’ Ramsay bawled. ‘Row, damn you, and be quick about it.’
Suddenly the boat skimmed into view and rammed noisily against the stairs on which Ramsay was standing. It splashed filthy water up over his shoes and breeches and made him roar out again.
‘What the hell … ? I’ll have a few words to say to you tomorrow, sir. By God I will.’
The clerk hobbled about trying to help Ramsay into the boat.
‘Och, it’s a terrible night, just terrible.’
‘We’ve had floodings before. Stop your whining, man.’
However, he couldn’t help being worried by the fact that it was still raining and he was somewhat disconcerted to see that the water had reached the Trongate end of Saltmarket Street although it wasn’t quite deep enough to float the boat into the back close. At least not with the weight of Sanny and him in it.
He climbed out cursing furiously at the discomfort of icy water lapping up his legs.
‘Well, don’t just sit there gawping,’ he told the other man. ‘Get out and shove it to the foot of the stairs and secure it to the hitching post, or better still, heave it into the tower to keep it dry. If the rain goes on like this, it could fill the boat by morning. After you see to the boat, get away home.’
Sanny lived up the High Street and well away from any danger or discomfort from the river.
The wind was singing a sad song inside the tower stair as he squelched his way up in the dark. Vagrants were huddled back against the walls. He couldn’t see them but he could hear them chittering with the cold. Somewhere among them a child wept.
He tirled the door-pin, then waited impatiently in the pitch black landing. Straining his ears for Betsy or Big John’s feet in the lobby, all he could hear was the whispering in the stairs behind him and somewhere nearer the busy squeaking of rats. Then, as if from far off, Annabella’s voice called:
‘Betsy, where the hell are you? Open the door at once.’
He couldn’t think why Annabella kept Betsy as a servant. The girl was always howling and crying or getting into panics. Either that or she was curling up in front of the fire and falling asleep. Sometimes he wondered if Annabella was as perjink and unconcerned as she made herself out to be. She often raged at Betsy but in actual fact she was far too soft with the girl. Betsy was supposed to cook all the food but as far as he could see, Annabella did most of the cooking herself. She should have been flung out on the streets long ago. Any servant living under his roof, using his candles, eating his food, had to work for their keep. He’d had to work hard all his life. Nobody had given him anything for nothing. He suddenly battered at the door with his fist.
‘Betsy, damn ye!’
Her high-pitched wail came trailing from the direction of the kitchen and grew louder as it reached the door. As soon as it creaked open a crack, he punched it wide, nearly knocking both Betsy and her candle to the floor. An amber glow from his daughter’s bedroom guided him towards it. The claret-coloured curtains and bed-drapes were drawn and a fire flung out orange flames of light over the japanned pier glass, picking out its raised figures of peacocks and flowers. It reddened the mahogany of the highboy too and made the gold drawer handles gleam. One candle would have been all that was required to add to the fire’s brightness. Yet Annabella was sitting calmly stitching at her embroidery with a candelabra holding three candles on the table in the centre of the room. Another candelabra stood on the tea-table beside the bed.
‘You’d think this was an assembly hall,’ he protested indignantly. ‘Candles cost money, mistress. And don’t you forget it.’
‘You’re very late, Papa.’
‘Do you wonder, in weather like this?’
‘Is it still raining, then?’
‘I had to come home in a bloody boat.’
She looked up.
‘Lord’s sake, it’s not as bad as that, surely?’
‘Are you calling me a liar?’
Putting aside her embroidery she rustled to her feet and went over to peer out the window. When she opened the curtains she immediately felt an icy dampness from the glass. Moonlight and the occasional lantern of a passer-by revealed Trongate Street to be clouded with rain and a quagmire underfoot.
Her father said,
‘Not there. Saltmarket Street and further down by the river. The counting house must be near waist deep by now.’
‘It’s a good thing that Douglas’s place is one up.’
‘Aye. If the water splashed into his place he’d be as much use at saving his furniture or his family as that blubbering fool of a lassie through there.’
‘Gracious heavens, I hope it doesn’t get any worse.’
‘Aye. I’m away through to take these wet shoes and breeches off and get into my dressing-gown. See that my food’s on the table by the time I get back.’
After he left the room she plucked aside the curtains of the other window and tried to get a good look at Saltmarket Street. But there were no lanterns there and the moon kept playing hide and seek. She caught brief glimpses of the grey outline of buildings opposite silhouetted against a smoky sky. Then darkness. Sometimes the moon reflected in water sending icicle fingers pointing down the street. How much water there was she found it difficult to judge. There might only be a few inches. Or it could be a couple of feet deep. Picking up a candelabra, she went through to the kitchen trying to squash the uneasiness she was beginning to feel.
‘What are you sitting there for? You lazy slut. Get the food through to the table. And where’s Big John?’
Betsy’s eyes filled and a tremor attacked her lips.
‘He went to see to the horses. Said they’d be feart and restless. I’m feart as well, mistress.’
Annabella rolled her eyes.
‘You’re always the same. What are you afraid of now?’
‘The river’s lapping about the streets.’
‘Well, ju
st think yourself lucky you’re not out there. Now get the dinner on the table. Don’t have me telling you again.’
No sooner had she returned to the bedroom than her father entered. He had removed his long curly wig and was wearing a dark blue nightcap over his shaved head. A royal blue dressing-gown braided with gold was wrapped around his tall frame and cloth slippers had replaced his buckled shoes.
‘Where’s Mungo?’ he said.
‘He wanted to stay with his cousin. I’ll collect him and bring him home tomorrow.’
‘If I’d known you’d been so foolish I would have collected the lad and brought him back with me in the boat.’
Annabella hesitated.
‘Do you think I ought to go and fetch him?’
‘The bairn will be in bed by now. Dragging him out at this time of night would do more harm than good. You should never have left him there. Now he’s missed the reading. I doubt if Douglas even sees to his family’s prayers.’
‘It’s not missing the reading and prayers I’m worried about, Papa.’
‘Oh, aye, I can believe that. You’ve never been much concerned with the word o’ the Lord. But He’ll catch up with you yet. In His righteous wrath, He’ll strike you down. For all the wicked things you’ve said and done in your life, the Lord God will …’
‘Papa, the Saltmarket’s a slope, isn’t it?’ she interrupted impatiently.
‘It’s got a wee bit of a slope, aye.’
‘So the water will be deeper at Douglas’s end.’
‘The water would have to rise ten feet or more to flood their place, woman.’
Betsy came snivelling in with a steaming tureen of soup and laid it on the table. Then she stood wiping at her nose and eyes with her sleeve.
‘Go and bring the mutton and the chicken pie, then,’ Annabella said. ‘You’ve only got the soup, the salmon and the oatcakes here.’
She settled herself opposite her father at the table.
‘Yes, of course, Papa; it couldn’t possibly do that.’
She ate her soup daintily. No more was said. The fire crackled occasionally through the silence. Then there was the hoarse craw-craw of the door-pin.
The Tobacco Lords Trilogy Page 65