The Dark Side of Pleasure

by Margaret Thomson-Davis

  This book is dedicated to

  Mr Glasgow – Jack House

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part 2

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  There it was again—that look Augusta had detected before. How dare this insolent coachman make her feel so flustered, staring at her from where he waited. She tried to discountenance the fellow with a disdainful gaze, but she found herself blushing and had to lower her eyes.

  Her face hidden by her poke bonnet, Augusta followed her mother across the pavement from the straw-hat maker’s. At a discreet distance came the footman, laden with their purchases; not only hat boxes were balanced on his outstretched arms but also larger boxes containing their new gowns.

  Reaching the coach, an elegant buttercup-yellow and black carriage, the older woman bunched her skirts with mittened hands and stepped inside with a rustle. Before Augusta could do the same, Gunnet the coachman gripped her arm and levered her upwards. His touch whipped her blood into such a fire of distress she was agitated enough to try to complain to her mama. But her mama was chattering on at such a pace about their new outfits that it was impossible to get a word in.

  ‘It is such an important occasion,’ Mrs Felicity Campbell insisted. ‘We must look our very best. Think of it, Augusta! First there will be the review of the troops in Glasgow Green, then a great procession through the streets, then parties to attend in honour of His Royal Majesty King William. Isn’t it exciting? Mercy!’

  A sedan chair had impeded the path of the coach and distracted her attention. ‘Would you look at the impertinence of that! These highland chairmen have no respect. Why doesn’t Gunnet just whip them out of his way? I’m sure our regular coachman would not have allowed us to be so inconvenienced.’ Mrs Cameron fluttered her handkerchief in front of her face and closed her eyes.

  ‘Is that Mrs Binny, Mama, coming out of the mantua-maker’s?’

  ‘Mercy upon us, so it is!’ Mrs Cameron settled back against the cushions.

  ‘Didn’t they assure us that they were not having any new gowns for the Coronation celebrations?’

  ‘They did indeed. Oh, the slyness of the creatures! They have been seeking to persuade us to wear old gowns so that they might make us suffer some disadvantage. But do not worry. Neither Miss Mary Binny nor her sister Fay could outshine you in beauty, Augusta. No matter what splendid gown they surprised us with.’

  There could, in fact, be no denying that Augusta was beautiful. Her complexion had a milky sheen enhanced by the earth-red colour of her bonnet and the blue gloss of ribbons tied under her chin. The bunches of ringlets that peeped out and dangled high over her temples were golden, whereas her mother’s hair was brown sprinkled with grey. Both women had fine haughty eyes, but Augusta’s were as blue as sapphires, while Mrs Cameron’s were a speckled brown.

  Felicity Cameron gossiped about the Binnys all the way to the Black Bull in Virginia Street. Then just as they were turning the corner both she and her daughter gave little squeals of fright and clung to each other when their coach nearly collided with another. The Tallyho from London was rolling in with its guard tooting his horn, its coachman desperately urging the horses on to complete the last few yards of the journey, although the animals were tired and hanging low in their traces, heads drooping. Passengers, black-smeared with dirt and looking like frozen crows, perched on the roof huddled in capes, long scarves, top hats and firmly tied bonnets.

  Augusta, after she and her mother had smoothed themselves down, recognised the coachman as one of her father’s many employees and also the husband of their cook Nessie Cruickshanks who lived somewhere in the dungeons of Cameron House. The man was of the old school and held a very poor opinion, so her papa said, of the new flashman types—men like Gunnet, who despite his coarse features was one of Mr Cameron’s most elegant dragsmen. These younger coachmen had discarded the bulky benjamin overcoat as well as the old wide-brimmed hat. Well-born gentlemen now admired the trade and viewed it an honour to sit up on the box beside this new breed of coachman and be allowed to take the rein. Even Augusta’s brother Roderick often journeyed on the box with Gunnet, chatting knowledgeably to him as if he was an equal.

  ‘Mama would not be pleased at you being on such familiar terms with a servant, Roderick,’ she had protested.

  ‘Make no mistake about it, dear sister, Luther Gunnet is no common serving lout. He is a fine fellow and a swell dragsman. Why, I’ve seen him with one easy flick of his whip pick a fly off the ear of his nearside leader.’

  ‘A very grand, silver-mounted whip, I’ve noticed. Something that no servant, no matter how smart a fellow, could ever afford to purchase.’

  ‘I admit it,’ Roderick grinned, ‘it was a gift from yours truly, and why not? It’s the fashion for gentlemen to give patronage to their favourite coachmen.’

  ‘I’m quite sure you couldn’t afford it either, Roderick. One of these days Papa will refuse to provide any more for such extravagances or to pay your gambling debts. Then you will wish you had been wiser and saved money instead of squandering it. And no good can come of giving expensive gifts to a man like Gunnet.’

  She would have liked to say more, to have revealed her strange unease at the dark eyes keenly probing her, despite the creases that held them narrow and half-hidden. But she did not know how to voice her complaints about the servant without compromising herself. What anyway would or could her brother do? No, far better to say nothing. But even now she trembled in confusion and her cheeks burned.

  ‘Augusta, my dear, what are you thinking of?’

  ‘Why, nothing, Mama; nothing, I do assure you.’

  ‘We are here. Why don’t you alight?’

  With a loud rustle of skirts and padded sleeves Augusta hastened from the coach.

  ‘Mercy upon us, there is no sign of your papa. It is too bad of him. He knows we do not like to be kept waiting. We shall seek him out in his office.’

  Augusta resisted the urge to look round at the coachman, grateful of the shield her poke bonnet gave to her face. She hurried after her mother across the hotel yard with its line of mud-caked coaches and steaming, snorting horses at as smart a pace as her little flat cross-banded shoes and her long skirts and petticoats would allow. Serving maids in frilly mob caps watched her progress from the hotel windows, gazing enviously at her blue-spotted dress with its sloping shoulders and sleeves enormously wide at the elbows, and at Mrs Cameron’s green pelisse and pink feathered bonnet, until both ladies disappeared from view under the covered archway that led to the cluttered yard where Mr Cameron, the coach proprietor, had his of
fices.

  Various employees in the yard lifted their caps or knuckled their foreheads and called out respectfully: ‘Mornin’, Mistress Cameron. Mornin’, Miss Cameron.’

  Inside the office building clerks perched on high stools at slope-topped desks also saluted or gave obsequious bows. Mrs Cameron, followed by her daughter, swept past them and straight into her husband’s private sanctum without knocking.

  At the sudden eruption of colour in his dark mahogany-panelled office, Alfred Cameron leapt to his feet in dismay.

  ‘Mrs Cameron, can it be that time already? It cannot, surely! I would not have kept you waiting for the world . . . .’

  ‘Mr Cameron has forgotten us!’ his wife exclaimed.

  ‘No, no!’ Cameron strode towards her and guided her into a chair. ‘A somewhat annoying matter of business distracted me.’

  ‘I feel quite faint with fatigue, Mr Cameron. I have been subjected to the common rough and tumble of the streets these past two hours, in my efforts to ensure that I will be a credit to you during tomorrow’s celebrations . . . .’

  ‘Mrs Cameron, rest assured I will be proud of you as always. How could I be otherwise? There isn’t another man in Glasgow can boast of such a beautiful wife.’

  He was an ox of a man in his mid-forties with shifty eyes, side-whiskers and moustache of polished brass. His broad face with its humpbacked nose, flat at the end under which his bottom lip stuck out fleshily, would have made him look more like a pugilist than a businessman had it not been for his expensive clothes and confident bearing. He did not appear too sure of himself now, however, confronted by the small figure of his wife. He was a man of avid appetites, the most obsessive of which was that for his wife’s body. It was a continuous struggle to keep his desires within respectable bounds, and she tormented him greatly by withholding herself at the slightest whim.

  Now she delicately strained away from him, averting her face. ‘Augusta, my dear,’ she appealed with a flutter of her eyelashes, ‘assist your poor mama to her carriage.’

  Cameron opened the office door, his face sagging with wretchedness, but he quickly recovered to growl at one of the clerks in passing and see them all scratching, heads down at their ledgers.

  Once in the carriage Felicity melted with a faint smile. ‘What business could it be that so distracted your mind, Mr Cameron?’

  ‘Nothing to worry your pretty head about, Mrs Cameron. Just a lot of foolish talk about railways.’

  ‘Railways?’ His wife looked puzzled.

  Cameron absently fondled his moustache. ‘It’s a kind of iron road. Thank goodness you haven’t seen the mess of the countryside these Irish navvies have been making. Digging here. Knocking down there. Building ugly monstrosities here, there and everywhere.’

  ‘Mercy!’

  ‘They’ve had railways at the pits for a while, of course. Trucks on iron rails pulled along by horses. That’s all very well, but now they’re opening this new railway between Glasgow and Garnkirk and it’s going to be worked by one of those new-fangled steam engines.’

  ‘Steam engines?’

  ‘I don’t want to shock you, my dear, but it’s a noisy, filthy monster that eats coal and belches smoke and flame and will be most dangerous to life and limb for anyone who goes near it.’

  ‘Mercy upon us, Mr Cameron, such things shouldn’t be allowed! Why don’t you do something?’

  He patted his wife’s hand. ‘Such foolishness can’t last. And I’ll take care you won’t be troubled with steam engines, never fear. Now, tell me about your purchases. Did they please you? Are you excited about tomorrow, Augusta?’

  ‘Oh, yes, Papa. We are going to watch Lieutenant Fitzjames parade on the Green, then later he is joining us at the Tontine.’

  Her father laughed. ‘There will be many more than Lieutenant Fitzjames parading there tomorrow, but I have no doubt you will have eyes for only one.’

  Augusta flushed and gazed down at her lap.

  ‘A capital fellow,’ Cameron went on, ‘and he comes from such a wealthy family. I even forgive him for being English.’

  Augusta was comforted to be reminded of Lieutenant Fitzjames’s fortune. Soon she would be far away from Glasgow and enjoying the protection of a husband of substance and with servants of her own choice. She assured herself of this every time she felt beset by foolish fears and uncertainties.

  The coach stopped and they stepped out on to George Square and made their way up the double outside stair to Cameron House. When Tibs Gunnet, the coachman’s sister, opened the door Augusta, upset at being reminded of the coachman and his dark provocative eyes, swept past her, ignoring the girl’s nervous bob of a curtsy.

  Somewhere among the babble of the crowded Glasgow streets, Blind Alick, with head cocked and hair spiking from his hat, was scraping at his fiddle. The tinny notes wailed above the clamour of the street-sellers.

  ‘Halfpenny, halfpenny milk-o!’

  ‘Flowers, penny a bunch!’

  ‘Hot pies! Hot pies!’

  Luther Gunnet decided to buy some pies to share with his mother and young brother and sister. He had told them he would be home tonight, and tomorrow morning he would be able to take them to see the grand procession to celebrate the coronation of King William IV. He had no intention of staying in all night, though. Jody, one of the chambermaids at the Tontine Hotel, would be waiting for him, propped up in bed on one elbow, her tangle of hair and her bare skin gleaming in the light of the candle . . . .

  He was tempted to forget his promise to go home, but relented on thinking of how much his family would enjoy the parcel of pies under his arm. This way and that he winded through the crowd with as much skill and panache as if he were still at the reins of a coach and four. Crossing the rough causeway of Argyle Street he went swaggering towards the Stockwell.

  Earlier, rain had gusted along Stockwell Street, but now knots of people emerged from the gloomy shelter of closes or out of the flickering lights of clubs and taverns. Under the blue glow of gas lamps and against walls men leaned wearily. Children sat huddled in doorways or stood begging. Women, old before their time, bent into shawls and shuffled along. A whole army of young prostitutes, flaunting their silks and satins and brightly rouged cheeks, paraded in efforts to attract attention. These women lived alongside the Gunnets in the rabbit warrens of tenement closes around the Briggait, the Saltmarket, the Gallowgate and the High Street. Luther had grown up with them and gone to school with them. He remembered the times when their parents had been transported or hanged or had died of some disease or abandoned them, or when their families just fell into such dire poverty that the girls and often the mothers too were forced into thieving and prostitution in order to survive.

  The best of luck to them was what he thought, though he had had to be careful not to say anything of the sort when his father was alive. His father had been a hand-loom weaver, a proud and honest man who had toiled to keep his family if not in luxury, at least fed and respectably clad. He had set great store by school learning. Whereas nearly all the children in the neighbourhood were forced through necessity to start work at seven or eight years of age, Luther and his sister had attended school until they were twelve. Then Tibs had gone into service at the Cameron House. Luther had gone on to college for a few years, until his father’s health had begun to deteriorate. The doctor had long said that it was consumption, but it was the cholera that killed the old man in the end.

  Anyway Luther had given up his book-learning in order to help supplement the family income, and not just willingly but with alacrity. He had never been as convinced as his father that education was the only way to do well. To accumulate money was Luther’s idea of getting on in life, and he wasn’t accumulating any money while imprisoned behind the grim walls of the college in the High Street droning out Latin verbs. In the few hours each day after he escaped from his studies he used to haunt the Cameron stables at the Black Bull. Sid Cruickshanks, the coachman who was married to the cook at Cameron House, ha
d taken an interest in him and, over the years, had taught him all there was to know about horses and how to handle a coach and four. Luther had also spent many hours in the company of the other coachmen, listening to their stories of the road and their endless discussions and criticisms of the technical aspects of driving.

  These same ‘lords of the road’ had eventually agreed that he had the most vital requirements for the job, keen eyes, strong arms, light hands, good nerves, even temper and plenty of practice. To his delight and great satisfaction, he was recommended to Mr Cameron when the latter needed a new coachman after the death in an overturning accident of coachman Bob Smithers.

  His parents had both been against the job, for different reasons. His father had believed that a clerk’s position in the Ship Bank would have been more in keeping with Luther’s college education. His mother worried because of the danger: so many coachmen had been injured or killed on the box. Then there was the amount of time he would be away from home, the low taverns he would be forced to frequent and the bad company, bad language and bad habits he might acquire. Eventually Luther had wheedled his parents into agreeing.

  ‘Coaching has changed out of all recognition.’ He struggled to spark them with some of his enthusiasm. ‘It isn’t like it used to be at all. It’s an art now. A highly respected art.’

  They had given him no encouragement but at least they had withdrawn their objections, or, more accurately, had ceased to voice them. When later he had paraded before them in all his splendour, they had been bewildered and overawed. He sported a well-brushed white topper, crisp linen with high stand-up collar around which was tied a black silk cravat. His trousers slimmed down to his ankles and strapped underneath his instep. His frock-coat pinched in tightly at his waist and curved out at the chest to reveal a wide expanse of pearl-buttoned waistcoat. He was clean-shaven but had a coarse bush of black hair and sideburns to match, and brows jutting over what many a female had referred to as wicked eyes. He was a fine figure of a fellow and he knew it. So did every wench in every tavern from Glasgow to London.