He got into a great scrape himself during this spring. He slept in my Mother’s dressing room, I being removed to Miss Gardiner’s room. The shower bath stood there, altho’ my Mother had given up the use of it, and it was of course supposed to be empty. We were all in this room at play with our Uncle, of whom we were very fond, and I suppose teasing him, for he suddenly caught up Jane, the most riotous of the set, and popt her into the shower bath, threatening a ducking, and touching, to prove his sincerity, the string. Down came the whole bucket full of water on the poor child’s head. Both the man and the baby were frightened near to death. He actually waited till the deluge was over before his presence of mind returned, and then the piteous object he rescued, stunned almost and dripping wet, at last she spoke. ‘Oh my red soos, my red soos!’ it was a new pair she had had put on that morning. I suppose no words ever gave more relief to an anxious listener. The hubbub brought my Mother, who, in the impartial manner customary in nursery dealings at that time, scolded us all round, and very heartily. We three departed in tears to have ‘that naughty little girl’ dried, leaving Uncle Edward at the shower bath looking very sheepish.
My three maiden Aunts were with us at this time, and Uncle Ralph came for a short visit, then Mr and Mrs Leitch, all to take leave of poor Uncle Edward, whom we observed begin to look very grave. He went often out in the carriage with my father, sometimes they remained away a long time, once, all the day; and trunks came, and parcels to fill them, and Mrs Lynch was marking stockings, changing buttons, and sewing on strings for ever. She made also a long, large chintz housewife full of pockets, with an attached thread case, and a curiously nicked leaf of scarlet cloth filled with needles; it was her modest offering to Mr Edward, who truly promised to keep it for her sake, for he shewed it to me more than twenty years afterwards at his house at Cambala in Bombay.
At length came a quite sad day; all the eyes in the house were red. On meeting, every one talked with assumed cheerfulness on indifferent subjects, to which no one seemed really to attend. A sort of nervousness spread from old to young; we children felt afraid of what was coming and as the hours wore away the gloom spread. We were all in the dining room when McKenzie opened the door; Uncle Edward rose and kissed each child; Mary was his darling, he doted on her with a love that never left him. ‘When shall I see you again, little woman?’ said he as he set her down out of his arms;—little any one of us there thought then where the next meeting would be, or when—his heart was too full for another word; he folded my Mother silently to his breast, I remember no one else present, and followed my father out, while she fell back in a passion of tears very rare in a woman of her calm, reserved nature. I watched through the blind and saw them turn the corner of Sir Giffin Wilson’s garden wall next door to us, my father leaning on my Uncle’s arm, and my Uncle with his hat slouched over his brows and his head held down. It was my first idea of grief; I had never lost any body I had loved before, and it was long ere even my gay spirits recovered from the first scene of distress I had noticed.
One of my employments at this time was to hold the skeins of cotton thread which my mother wound off very neatly on two square pieces of card placed one over the other, so as to form eight corners between which the thread was secured. This cotton sewing thread was a great invention, a wonderful improvement on the flax thread in previous use, which it was difficult to get of sufficient fineness for some works, and hardly possible to find evenly spun. When one thinks of the machinery spinning of these days, the cotton and flax threads like the fibres of spiders’ webs which we produce in ton weights now, we may indeed wonder at the difficulties in needle works overcome by our mothers.
‘Evenings at Home,’8 ‘Sandford and Merton,’9 and a short Roman history in which very little mention was made of Tullia, were added to our Library. In imitation of my Aunt Mary I began to take upon myself to tell fairy tales to ‘the little ones,’ sometimes relating, sometimes embellishing, sometimes inventing, choosing historical heroes to place in situations of my own imagining, turning all occurrences into romance. We acted too occasionally, dramatised striking incidents, or only played at ladies and gentlemen, copying the style of my Mother’s various visitors, supporting these characters for days together at our playhours. We began to feel great interest in Shakespeare’s plays, several of which we were taken to see, my father talking them over with us afterwards. I remember believing they were all extemporised by the players as they proceeded in their parts, like as we did ourselves in our own improvised dramas, and wondering whether we should ever, any of us, attain to the dignified declamation of John Kemble.
This spring of 1804 Aunt Mary had a long, serious illness. She was so weakened by it that country air was immediately recommended, so she and Aunt Fanny took lodgings at Richmond and I was sent with them. We lived in the house of a widow who had a parrot which talked to me just as much as ever I wished, and a maid who was quite pleased to have my company on all her errands. I recollect perfectly, delighting in the view of the river with so many pretty boats on it and gardens down to its edge. I liked to hear the sound of my jumping steps on the hard pathway, and I was charmed with what I called Rosamond’s labyrinth—two high walls turning off at angular corners for ever, between which a narrow road led, I think, to Kew, and where the view was limited the whole way to a few yards before us. Then I only wondered when we should escape out to the open country again, now a feeling of suffocation would come over me in such a place.
Mrs Bonner, our landlady, also allowed me to help her to make my Aunt’s puddings, the family preserves, pickles, etc., an honour I was extremely proud of and turned to good account in after days when recollection served me in the stead of experience. She also lent me an old tea caddy to put my work in; the sugar bowl and cannister had been broken, so the empty compartments exactly suited the patches I was engaged on, and made me as perfectly happy as if it had been the handsomest in the land. I was so improved by this visit to Richmond, that as my Aunts determined on remaining there during the summer, my father resolved to leave his two youngest children near them under the care of Nurse Millar, in whom they had full confidence. Lodgings were taken for them not far from Mrs Bonner, where they were to sleep and be sent whenever my Aunts were tired of them in the day, and William and I were to accompany our restless parents to the Doune.
I can’t remember where Aunt Lissy was all this time. I often recollect her with us, and then I miss her for long whiles. Though my father’s house was nominally her home she was perfectly independant, being now of age, and inheriting all that would have been her mother’s property by the Will of her Grandfather Raper. She had Twyford House, near Thorley Hall, in Hertfordshire, and a considerable sum of money from the savings during her minority. I have always heard her income called about £800 a year. She was not a beauty, short, thick made, plain features, with an agreeable expression, a clear but not a fair skin, and quiet manners. She was not a genius though possessed of a good understanding—her intellect had been undeveloped, afterwards it was cramped; her temper was charming, yet she and my Mother never got on well together. She had odd, quaint old maidish ways adopted from old Raper relations, with whom she very much lived. She had also continued an acquaintance with School friends, the results of which appeared again. She certainly did not go with us this year to the highlands.
1. James B. Johnston, Placenames of Scotland (1892), suggests ‘Fort of the big firs’—rath mhòir ghuithais.
2. Sir James Grant was born in I738 and died in 1811 ‘at Castle Grant where the greater part of his useful life had been spent’ (D.N.B.); see 1, pp. 71–2 for an explanation of this dispute.
3. A wooden vessel for carrying water.
4. English grammar adapted to the different classes of learners. With an appendix, containing rules and observations for assisting the more advanced students to write with perspicuity and accuracy (5th edition, York, 1799).
5. Guida di Musica (c.1785) by James Hook.
6. Her severe judgement on Pe
el is explained by his ‘betrayal’ of party principles with the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, the time she began her Memoirs.
7. One of the most influential East India Company directors; see A. T. Embree, Charles Grant and the British Rule in India (London, 1962).
8. Evenings at Home or The Juvenile Budget Opened, by Dr Aikin and Mrs Barbauld.
9. The History of Sandford and Merton for the Use of Juvenile Britons, by Thomas Day.
CHAPTER THREE
1804–1806
WE set off then some time in July, my father and mother, William and I, Mrs Lynch and McKenzie, in a new carriage, a sociable with a cane body, a roof on four supporters hung round with leather curtains, which we were constantly letting down and tying up according to the weather, and which we never managed to arrange in time either for wet or dry, and which, in spite of hooks and buttons, let in the rain whenever the showers were heavy. A very superiour description of horses replaced the Smiler and Blackbird of earlier years, and the four bloods which formed the present team—two bays and two grays, cross cornered—were driven by the smart coachman, William Millar, from the box. These horses for beauty were each a picture; they had cost proportionate sums, and they did their work, as the Coachman said, like jewels, never giving in nor shirking when once a start—but to make the start was the difficulty. Mr Coxe, named after his last master, and the most sedate of the set, merely indulged in a few plunges; but Highflyer, the other bay, regularly lay down, and it took all the hostlers and half the postboys at every inn, with plentiful applications of William Millar’s long whip, to bring him to his feet again. He was cured of this trick afterwards, I remember, by having lighted straw placed under him. The two grays were merely awkward, setting out different ways, the one to the right, the other to the left, instead of going straight forward. Such a crowd as used to gather round us. To add to the tumult, my mother, the most nervous woman that ever lived, kept screaming at the top of her voice all the time, standing up in the sociable and throwing herself half out at either side, entreating all the collected mob to have pity on her and open the door. This scene continued during the whole journey till we got quite accustomed to what at first had frightened William and me. We were pleased with our new queer carriage, glad to see our Landlady acquaintance, the boats at Boroughbridge, and other recollected objects, but we were not happy. We missed our little sisters, we talked over and over again when we were put to bed at night of all the tears shed on both sides at parting, particularly by poor Jane, who was always a most affectionate little creature. William was long before he became reconciled to the want of his favourite companion, and I regretted equally dear Mary, my live doll. It was not till we reached the Doune that we at all got over this painful separation. We were a less time than usual upon the road, luckily for our spirits, as we did not go to Houghton at all and were but a short time in Edinburgh.
On this journey I first remember old Neil Gow1 being sent for to play to us at the inn at Inver—not Dunkeld: that little village we passed through and went on to the ferry at Inver, which we crossed the following morning in a large boat. It was a beautiful ferry, the stream full and deep and dark, the banks overhung by fine timber trees, a glimpse of a newly planted conical hill up the stream, only thick wooding the other way. I don’t know whether this did not make more impression on me than Neil Gow’s delightful violin, though it had so over excited me the evening before that my father had had to take me a little walk by the river side in the moonlight before I was rational enough to be left to sleep. We were odd children, full of nonsense my mother said. Left to her, a good scold and a slap would have apparently quieted her little frantick daughter, though a sobbing sleepless night would have left but a poor object for the morrow. My father understood my temperament better. As for William, he took all in an easy Ironside way, remarking nothing but the peat reek, which neither he nor I had noticed before.
We passed a very happy season at the Doune. We did no lessons; we had a Jock McKenzie to play with us in the stead of George Ross, who had been made a groom of. We rode on the old gray pony; we paid quantities of visits to our friends all through Rothiemurchus, and we often had a brace of muirfowl for our dinner, each carving our bird. A dancing master taught us every variety of wonderful highland step—that is taught me, for William never could learn anything, but he liked hopping about to the fiddle—and we did ‘Merrily danced the quaker’s wife’ together, quite to the satisfaction of the servants, who all took lessons too, in common with the rest of the population, the highlanders considering this art an essential in the education of all classes, and never losing an opportunity of acquiring a few more flings and shuffles. The dancing master had, however, other most distinguished pupils, the present Duke of Manchester and his elder sister, Lady Jane Montague, who were then living in our close neighbourhood with their grandmother, the Duchess of Gordon.
This beautiful and very celebrated woman2 had never, I fancy, lived very happily with her Duke. His habits and her temper not suiting, they had found it a wise plan to separate, and she had for the last few years spent her summers at a little farm on the Badenoch property, a couple of miles higher up the Spey than our Doune, and on the opposite side of the water. She inhabited the real old farmhouse of Kinrara, the same our good cousin Cameron had lived in, and where I have heard my mother say that the Duchess was happier and more agreeable, and the society she gathered round her far pleasanter, than it ever was afterwards in the new cottage villa she built about a mile nearer to us. It was a sort of backwoods life, charming to young people amid such scenery, a drama tick emancipation from the forms of society that for a little while every season was delightful, particularly as there was no real roughing in it. In the but and the ben, constituting the small farm cabin it was she and her daughter Lady Georgina dwelt in, by the help of white calico, a little white wash, a little paint, and plenty of flowers they made their apartment quite pretty. What had been kitchen at one end of the ‘house’ was elevated by various contrivances into a sitting room; a barn was fitted up as a barrack for ladies, a stable for gentlemen; a kitchen was easily formed out of some of the out offices, and in it, without his battery, without his stove, without his thousand and one assistants and resources, her French cook sent up dinners still talked of by the few remaining partakers. The entrées were all prepared in one black pot—a large potato chaudron, which he had ingeniously divided within into four compartments by means of two pieces of tin sheet crossed, the only inconvenience of this clever plan being that the company had to put up with all white sauces one day and all brown the next. Her favourite footman, Lang James, a very handsome, impudent person, but an excellent servant for that sort of wild life, able to put his hand to any work, played the violin remarkably well, and as every tenth highlander at least plays on the same instrument tolerably, there was no difficulty in getting up a highly satisfactory band on any evening that the guests were disposed for dancing. Half the London world of fashion, all the clever people that could be hunted out from all parts, all the north country, all the neighbourhood from far and near without regard to wealth and station, and all the kith and kin both of Gordons and Maxwells, flocked to this encampment in the wilderness during the fine autumns to enjoy the free life, the pure air, and the wit and fun the Duchess brought with her to the mountains.
Lady Georgina Gordon, the youngest of the fair sisters of that, the last generation of that noble name, and the only one unmarried, was much liked; kind hearted she has all through her life shown herself to be; then, in her early youth, she was quiet and pleasing as well as lively. Unchangeable in amiability of manner, she was very variable in her looks; one day almost beautiful, the next day, almost plain; so my mother described her when she described those merry doings in the old cottage at Kinrara in days quite beyond my memory. Lady Georgina had been some years married to the Duke of Bedford, and the Duchess of Gordon was living in her new house in this summer of 1804 when I first recollect them as neighbours. Our two dwellings were little m
ore than a mile apart, but as I have said, the river was between us, a river not always in the mood for assisting intercourse. There were fords which allowed of carriage and pony communication at several points, but only when the water was low. At flood times passengers had to go down the stream to Inverdruie, or up the stream to near Loch Inch to the big boats, when they carried their equipages with them; those who walked could always find a little boat near every residence, and our ferries were in constant requisition, for no day passed without a meeting between the Doune and Kinrara. When the Duchess had miscalculated her supplies, or more guests arrived than she could possibly accommodate, the overplus as a matter of course came over to us. All our spare rooms were often filled even to the many beds in the barrack, and at Kinrara shakedowns in the dining room and the sofas in the drawing room were constantly resorted to for gentlemen who were too late for a corner in the ‘wooden room,’ a building erected a short way from the house in the midst of the birch thicket upon the banks.
Many changes had happened in our family since my baby recollections of the members of it. Old Donald was dead, old Christy was pensioned and settled with some relations in Duthil; Miss Jenny was married, my Uncle Sandy’s five sons were all sent abroad about the world, and my father’s first cousins, Glenmoriston and Logie, who used to be a good deal with us while bachelours, were both of them married and fixed in their beautiful homes and so the style of our house was a good deal altered, improved. There were still the Captain and Mrs Grant at Inverdruie, and the Colonel at the Croft, and Mr Cameron at Kainapool, and there were at a little distance, up in Badenoch, old Invereschie and his niece, and young Belleville and his bride. Cluny beyond in Laggan; down the Spey, Castle Grant, Ballindalloch, Arndilly and Altyre; Moy, Burgie, etc., in Morayshire; parties from which houses were frequently with us—all except our Chief. I don’t remember my father and mother going much from home this season, or indeed at all, except to Kinrara; they had not time, for so many English travellers were in the habit of making hotels of the houses of the highland proprietors, there was a sort of running stream of them during the latter part of summer. Mrs Thrale and her daughters,3 and Mr and Mrs Murray Aust,4 my mother afterwards continued an acquaintance with. In general, these chance guests were hardly agreeable enough to be remembered.
Memoirs of a Highland Lady Page 6