Light & Dark

by Margaret Thomson-Davis

  As for Covenant Close, what an historic place that was! Clementina was looking forward to seeing it, especially the sacred apartment in which the Solemn League and Covenant had been signed. Wise and good men had taken part in this ‘act of faith’ and she would not be afraid of their ghosts.

  There were other phantoms of former days, however, that did make her feel uneasy. Edinburgh had so many places in which ghosts lay in wait, unexpected archways and alleyways, and long almost perpendicular streets of stairs crushed between buildings so close together you could touch each side.

  So many queer little graveyards with tombstones sloped over ravines as if, as Miss Viners said, even the dead in Edinburgh could not be shut out from her great views.

  Clementina was surprised to see not ghosts in the Lawnmarket, but real flesh and blood people. It wasn’t too late an hour, but certainly late enough for so many young children to be roaming about. As she made her way down on to the dark High Street the feeble light from the gas-lamps picked out more and more people—women with shawls over their heads and held tightly under their chins, other younger women in short woollen petticoats and bare heads, men reeling drunkenly about.

  Clementina tried to quell her mounting apprehension. No harm would come to her once she found Alice. This thought bolstered her courage and when a foul-smelling man staggered in her path and tried to detain her, she haughtily ordered him out of her way. The man immediately mimicked her voice and other men and women nearby roared with laughter and joined in the sport. Like demented witches, women leered and sneered and pushed around. Men became all groping hands which exploded instant panic in Clementina and she had never felt such relief in her life as when Alice suddenly came crashing through the circle of her tormentors. The same Alice who had helped her fight off the tormenting village children. Only this time she was screaming obscenities as well as hitting out with fists and feet. It was a relief to get her courage back and to land almost as many punches as Alice; it didn’t take long for the drunken crowd to melt away.

  ‘Oh, Alice!’ Clementina clung round her neck, half-laughing, half-crying. ‘I knew I would be all right once you were here. I knew you wouldn’t let anybody hurt me. Remember how you always used to look after me when I was wee?’

  Alice had gone quiet and Clementina let go of her and stood back. It was difficult to see through the gloom, but even so she felt shocked anew at the change in her.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked anxiously. ‘Are you ill? Don’t worry, Alice, I will look after you. We’ll look after each other.’

  Alice looked as if she was searching for words and no longer knew which ones to choose. She looked bewildered, almost tragic.

  ‘It’s all right, Alice,’ Clementina soothed. ‘Take me to your house and then we can talk things over and plan what we’re going to do. Everything is going to be all right. I am well and strong and I’m going to do whatever I can for you.’

  She linked her arm through Alice’s and held tightly on to her. Then, going up the dark stairs, they held hands.

  ‘Remember going up and down the tower stairs?’ Clementina asked. ‘Remember how you always used to take me with you—even when you were off duty—rather than leave me alone when I was afraid? I have never forgotten you for that, Alice. In fact I … I …’—she was glad of the darkness and Alice’s silence to cover her embarrassment—’… loved you more than my mother. You always meant more to me than any of my family.’ She was glad she had said this because it was the truth, and she had always wanted to say it. Despite her embarrassment, it gave her a deep feeling of satisfaction and happiness.

  Alice led her first of all into the kitchen and here Clementina’s happiness evaporated with horror. A huge bloated woman whose fingers were thick with rings came leering towards them.

  ‘Come away in and get a heat at the fire, lovely,’ she invited. ‘You’ll be Alice’s bonny wee friend. Och, and you are too.’

  The fire blazed hot as hell, casting a fierce sulphurous glow through the place and, helped by a candle flaring in a beer bottle, lit up a bed-recess in which three working lads and some women were sitting drinking.

  To the left of the kitchen, the sacred apartment where the Covenant had been signed was now a dingy cavernous hole filled with ramshackle beds, as were the other rooms. They were all crowded with drunken men and women and Nelly Rudd kept collecting entrance fees for the rooms as well as selling the occupants drink.

  Clementina refused the drink the proprietress offered her but Alice downed hers thirstily.

  ‘Alice,’ Clementina whispered, ‘we can’t stay in this horrible place. We must get out of here.’

  ‘Bloody hell!’ Alice said. ‘I need another drink.’

  ‘Oh, Alice …’

  Clementina felt panic rising again and had the sudden feeling of being caught in a nightmare. Even the smell of the place was overpowering.

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Alice.

  ‘Where you goin’, hen?’ Nelly Rudd’s big bulk blocked their path.

  ‘Where do you think?’ Alice replied cheekily.

  ‘Maybe you should leave your nice wee friend here till you come back, eh?’

  ‘Don’t be bloody daft,’ Alice scoffed. ‘She’ll bring them in like the bloody Pied Piper.’

  ‘Aye, right enough,’ Nelly agreed.

  Out in the street Clementina breathed a sigh of relief.

  ‘Oh Alice, I have never been so afraid in my life! Thank goodness we’ve escaped from there. Where are we going now?’

  ‘Come on,’ Alice said. ‘Run!’

  They ran without stopping until they had reached Princes Street. It was the dividing line and one that Alice knew she could no longer cross.

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Now, get to hell out of here!’

  Clementina gazed at her in bewilderment. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Are you stupid or something?’ Alice made an ugly sneering face. ‘I never want to set eyes on you again, that’s what!’

  ‘You can’t mean that!’

  ‘Why can’t I?’

  ‘But we wanted to be together?’

  ‘Maybe that’s what you wanted, but not me. I’ve got plenty of friends, Nelly Rudd included. I don’t need you! You’re just a bloody nuisance to me, always have been. Bloody stubborn little brat!’

  ‘Alice!’ Tears were filling Clementina’s eyes. ‘Please don’t say that!’

  ‘Why not? It’s the honest-to-God truth. You were always hanging round my neck. I was glad to get away to be rid of you, and I’m bloody sure I’m not going to have you hanging round my neck now. So piss off!’

  Clementina began to sob uncontrollably.

  ‘Piss off!’ Alice screamed. ‘You horrible little brat! No wonder your father beat you and your mother hates you. If they never bloody well wanted you, why should I? Get out of my sight!’ She gave the now hysterically weeping Clementina a push that sent her stumbling on to the road. ‘I never want to see your face again, do you hear? Not ever again!’

  With that she turned and disappeared into the darkness.

  Clementina was sick with grief. She never knew how she got back to Heriot Row and into the house. In fact she became so ill that she had to remain in bed for the next few days. Then she had to be taken home in Malcolm’s carriage which, although he said she was more than welcome to, nevertheless he had to point out was a great inconvenience for poor Mary Ann.

  The doctor who came to Blackwood House pronounced that there was nothing physically wrong with her and that her ‘little upset’, as he called it, must have been caused by the excitement of visiting the City.

  It would have been easy, Clementina sometimes thought, to just turn her face to the wall and die. She wanted to. Yet, at her lowest ebb, a stubborn tide rose up in her and she thought, ‘To hell with them all, including Alice!’ She didn’t need any of them; she had survived before on her own and she would survive again.

  PART 3

  REBELLION

  3
3

  Clementina stared solemnly at her reflection in the long mirror. It was a most important occasion—the most auspicious day in her life.

  ‘It is lovely, Miss Clementina.’ Flora McGregor, the maid, stood back sighing with admiration at her own handiwork.

  ‘It makes me look more mature,’ Clementina agreed with satisfaction.

  ‘Are you quite certain now that your mother said you could have it up?’ Flora’s soft Highland voice went on. ‘Most young ladies have to wait until they are seventeen or eighteen.’

  ‘It’s my hair,’ Clementina insisted stubbornly.

  The maid’s hands flew to her mouth. ‘You have not asked!’

  ‘I am sixteen. By Scottish law that means I am old enough to marry, so I’m surely capable of deciding how I should have my own hair dressed!’

  ‘Och, now you have done it!’ Flora’s words escaped before her natural caution could prevent them. ‘Mrs Musgrove, if not your mother, will be wanting to know on whose authority—’

  ‘I don’t take orders from Mrs Musgrove,’ Clementina interrupted disdainfully, unable to resist a slight emphasis on the ‘I’. What she refrained from saying was that even if her mother noticed, she wouldn’t care how her daughter’s hair was dressed. All she cared about was little Jamie and it was quite embarrassing the way she doted on him. Indeed, it even seemed to embarrass Jamie, who often struggled angrily from her embraces. Only the other day Clementina had seen him stamp his foot in exasperation and shout, ‘Leave me alone, Mamma! I’m not a baby any more.’

  Already at the tender age of five, Jamie had the arrogance of all males. Clementina had noticed that even amongst the farm labourers’ children she used to play with, males had lorded it over females. It was a characteristic she had come to resent bitterly. What made the male sex so superior? she would like to know.

  Still, she could not help being quite fond of Jamie, who was such a robust, independent child—not at all thin and weedy like Gilbert and Malcolm must have been and still were. Jamie somehow never looked the part in the ‘little Lord Fauntleroy’ velvet suits and fancy lace collars that Lorianna liked his nanny to dress him in for his many outings with both nurse and mother. Jamie had jet-black straight hair that somehow made him look tougher than the blue-eyed, curly blond-headed sons of his mother’s friends. Even the fact that he had inherited his mother’s brown eyes did nothing to soften this effect. Normally he was a calm, self-absorbed child who was quite happy left to himself. Indeed he seemed to prefer this and became quickly bored with his nanny’s or his mother’s attempts to entertain him with nursery rhymes or games. He liked to spend hours on his own setting up battles with his toy soldiers. Or doing jigsaw puzzles of farmyard scenes. Or making trees or animals with modelling clay. It only annoyed him if somebody tried to join in. But he especially hated being dressed up and taken out.

  ‘Of course,’ said Flora, who always tried to keep in with the powers-that-be, even the junior ones, ‘you have the nerve to stand up to Mrs Musgrove. She terrifies the wits out of me!’ She caressed the nest of amber hair and then held it between her outstretched palms like a sacred offering, while admiring it this way and that in the glass. ‘Yes, you have got the nerve all right, Miss Clementina. They are always saying that about you downstairs. “She has nerve enough for anything, that one”, they say.’

  Clementina glanced above her own reflection to study that of the maid. McGregor was a ruddy-cheeked woman whose eyes, although apparently wide and frank, could somehow give the impression at times of hiding rather than revealing the person inside. She had been trained as a housemaid under Ella Baxter, but had eventually been instructed to spend her time partly as Clementina’s personal maid and partly in keeping clean the schoolroom and Clementina’s and the governess’s rooms.

  This arrangement had come to pass when Jamie had been born and the whole of the top floor of the tower had been taken over for his needs. Now Jamie and Nanny Hawthorne slept in the night-nursery and Miller, the new nursery-maid slept in what had once been Alice Tait’s room. Clementina had been given the room downstairs next to the schoolroom which up to that point had been used for storing schoolbooks—and other books discarded for various reasons from the downstairs library—slates, chalks, pointers and a miscellany of equipment gathered over a period of years dating from Gilbert’s first schooldays.

  In converting the room from a general dumping ground to a bedroom for Clementina (the irony of the situation had not escaped her) the books had been left until either another place could be found for them or a decision made about throwing them out. As a result, Clementina had spent many an hour reading them by candlelight. Not that she needed to be furtive. Nanny Hawthorne’s duties did not include any responsibility for her and to Miss Viners she ceased to exist after four o’clock when the governess finished lessons for the day. This state of affairs had its compensations, because it afforded Clementina much more freedom than most of her contemporaries and was something of which she took full advantage.

  ‘Leave my hair now,’ she told the maid. ‘Tell me how I look in the skirt.’ She rose from the stool, marched back and forth in the small room and then gave a couple of twirls of the first long skirt she had ever possessed.

  Flora’s eyes flickered ceilingwards. ‘Beautiful! Beautiful! All at once you are a young lady instead of a young girl. You will be having all the young gentlemen after you.’

  Clementina immediately rounded on the maid. ‘I don’t want all the young gentlemen after me.’

  Flora saw that her compliment had somehow gone wrong, although she could not for the life of her think why it should have sparked off such anger.

  ‘Of course not, and quite right you are, Miss Clementina. Quite right.’

  ‘Nor do I need them.’

  ‘No, miss.’

  ‘Nor do you.’

  ‘No, miss,’ Flora repeated with somewhat less conviction.

  ‘It’s only a pretence that what every woman needs is a man. That’s a lie perpetuated by men.’

  ‘Yes, miss,’ Flora murmured faintly. It was common knowledge that Miss Clementina had always been a strange rebellious child, never out of trouble and always saying odd things. Instead of getting better as she grew older, as everyone had hoped, she seemed to be getting worse. Cook blamed Mrs Musgrove, ‘She’s an evil influence on both the mother and the daughter, that one.’

  But Flora thought Miss Viners had more to do with the way Clementina was growing up. After all, she was with her most of every day except Saturdays and Sundays when the governess’s duties finished at one o’clock.

  ‘All I want,’ said Clementina earnestly, ‘is to look adult and mature. Well? Do I?’

  ‘Oh yes, miss. Oh yes, indeed.’

  Clementina smoothed down the well-cut navy serge of the skirt, well pleased with herself.

  ‘That will be all, McGregor.’

  ‘Yes, miss.’ Flora stopped at the door and added with a hint of slyness in her voice but only innocence in her eyes, ‘Will you be dining downstairs this evening?’

  Clementina was taken aback. It was the usual thing, once one graduated from childhood to maturity, to start having dinner in the dining-room with the other grown-ups instead of nursery tea. However, this would be a very daring thing for her to do, taking into consideration the fact that she had not been invited.

  She managed to shrug in reply to the maid. ‘I may. It depends.’

  Flora gave a small smile before leaving.

  Clementina stood rather uncertainly before the mirror now. She was far from sure if she really wanted to take such a step from the nursery into the world of downstairs. She seldom even went to the drawing-room or sitting-room to see her mother any more, preferring either to read in her room or, if it were summer, to take her book out to the garden. Quite often she visited her best friend, Millicent Price-Gordon, or one of her other friends. Millicent was eighteen, had put her hair up ages ago and was now dining with her parents every evening. But Millicent was
different. Her parents wanted her.

  Clementina tried as a rule never to think about her mother. To blank her father from her mind took little effort and for most of the time it was as if he had never existed. But her mother did exist and could sometimes appear unexpectedly in the garden or the reception hall or on the stairs. At these unplanned and unwanted meetings they greeted each other civilly enough and sometimes her mother forced herself to stand and chat for a few minutes, as if she were interested in finding out whatever she could about her daughter. Clementina knew it was a forced and artificial interest, a desperate attempt to appear dutiful. She saw it in the unnatural widening of her mother’s eyes, dark eyes that so often had such a strange haunted look. She sensed it too in the tension that emanated from her mother’s body, tension so real she could almost see and touch it.

  Once, in a moment of weakness, she had actually touched her mother. It was not long after Jamie had been born and she had been banished to the schoolroom quarters. It had been a wrench leaving the familiar night-nursery where she had once been so happy with Henny. The nursery quarters for better or worse had always been her domain, her home ground. And suddenly that ground had been snatched from beneath her. Suddenly everything had changed. Strangers had taken over—the new nanny, the new nursery-maid, the new baby.

  Clementina had needed something or someone to hold on to then and had put out her hand and tentatively stroked her mother’s arm. Ever since, she had been trying to forget the way her mother had involuntarily shrunk back, but she could never quite manage to heal the wound made by Lorianna’s reaction. She could never completely erase the memory of the horror on her mother’s face. For long days and nights, weeks, sometimes even months she would never think of it. Then at other times she would purposely dwell on the scene and would try in a sensible adult way to rationalise her mother’s behaviour. But always the result was the same. In the end she simply shrivelled helplessly inside, grief-stricken, bewildered and unbearably ashamed. It had not been disinterest or dislike or even distaste she had seen on her mother’s face, but absolute horror. It had only been a brief second before it had been brought under control and safely hidden behind a desperate smile and a rush of kindly words.