Memoirs of a Highland Lady

by Elizabeth Grant

  My father was very much annoyed at this misfortune; he would do nothing towards any further arrangements for the comfort of these old bodies—perhaps they lived to repent their folly. He did not give up his building, however. The next cottage he undertook was given to much more grateful occupants. He had intended it as a toy for my Mother, but the son of amusement of fitting it up not suiting her tastes, it was eventually made over to us, and became one of the principal delights of our happy Rothiemurchus life. We will pause before describing it. Dalachapple once conversing with my Mother concerning some firm in Glasgow the partners of which she had been acquainted with in her dancing days, They failed, didn’t they, ‘said she. ‘They paused,’ said he. So will we. It was a very expressive term.

  1. Printers and publishers names: Elzevir is the famous Dutch publisher; Aldines stems from Aldus Manutius of Venice; John Baskerville (1706−75) was printer to the University of Cambridge.

  2. Sir James Gibson Craig of Riccarton (E.G.’s sister Jane’s second husband).

  3. To lay out or compose a dead body.

  4. George, thirteenth Earl, eighth Marquess, fifth and last Duke of Gordon (1770−1836). He and his family were Highland neighbours and close friends.

  5. He was Colonel of the 92nd. (Gordon) Highlanders from 1796 and of the 42nd. Highlanders (Black Watch) from 1806; he had seen active service during the Irish rebellion 1798, in Holland 1799 and Walcheren 1809; he commanded the army in Scotland between 1803 and 1806.

  6. His wife was Elizabeth, daughter of Alexander Brodie of Arnhall and they were married in December 1813. According to the Scots Peerage, which also describes her father as ‘a wealthy India merchant’, it was not Methodism she turned towards; ‘she became a leading adherent of the Free Church when that body seceded in 1843.’

  7. Noted historian, orator and friend of Alexander Pope, Viscount Bolingbroke was impeached over his attempt to restore the Stuart dynasty. As an extreme Tory, he keeps odd company in this list especially because E.G.’s father was such a dedicated Whig.

  8. Paradise Lost,1,314; Tristram Shandy,VI,ch. 6, recounts Le Fever’s death.

  9. ‘The Mother, wi’ her needle and her sheers Gars ould claes look amaist as weel’s the new’ (The Cottar’s Saturday Night verse 6)

  10. E.G.’s youngest child and only son.

  11. Where the virgins are soft as the roses they twine.

  And all, save the spirit of man, is divine.

  Byron, The Bride of Alydos (I,i)

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  1814

  IN years long gone by a certain William Grant, who I believe claimed some sort of kin with the family, had listed for a soldier and gone off to foreign parts, never to return in his former station among his people. He rose early from the ranks, and during a very prosperous career in India won for himself fame, and rupees to balance it. A curious kind of narrow minded man, he had, however, the common virtue of his race—he never forgot his relations; in his advancement he remembered father, mother, brothers, sisters, Uncles, Aunts, and cousins, none were neglected. There was a deal of good sense, too, in the ways he took to provide for them. One brother was never more nor less than a common soldier. We knew him always as Peter the Pensioner, on account of sixpence a day my father got him from Greenwich, in lieu of an eye he had lost in some engagement. He lived in one of a row of cottages on the Mill town moor, with a very decent wife and a large family of children, all of whom earned their bread by labour. We had a son in the wood work and a daughter as kitchenmaid during the time their uncle the General was paying a visit to us.

  The next brother rose to be a major, and retiring from the Army in middle life, settled on the farm of Craggan some miles down Speyside. His two sons, educated by the Uncle, were both of them Lieutenant Colonels before their death. The daughter, to whom he was equally kind, he took out to India, where she married a Civilian high up in the service.1 He left the rest of his relations in their own place, merely befriending them occasionally; but for his mother, when she became a widow and wished to return to Rothiemurchus, where she was born, he built a cottage in a situation chosen by herself, at the foot of the Ord Ban, surrounded by birch trees, just in front of the old Castle on the lake. Here she lived many years very happy in her own humble way on a little pension he regularly transmitted to her, neither ‘lifted up’ herself by the fortunate career of her son, nor more considered by the neighbours in consequence. She was just the Widow Grant to her death. After she was gone, no one caring to dwell in so lonely a spot, the little cottage fell to ruin; only the walls were standing when my father took a fancy to restore it, add to it, and make it a picture of an English home. He gave it high chimneys, two or three gable ends, and very wide windows. It was a very pretty outside. Within were three rooms, a parlour, a front kitchen boarded, a back kitchen bricked. He hoped my mother would have fitted it up like to her Hough ton recollections of peasant comfort, but it was not her turn. She began indeed by putting six green painted Windsor chairs into the front kitchen, and hanging a spare warming pan she had on the wall, there being by the bye no bedroom in the cottage; here her labours ended. The shutters of these pretty, little, neatly finished cheerful rooms were seldom opened, moss, stones and heather lay undisturbed around its white washed walls, no one almost ever entered the door. But it had a good effect in the scenery. Coming out of the birch wood it struck every eye, and seen from the water when we were in the boat rowing over the lake, that single habitation amid the solitude quite enlivened the landscape. We young people had the key, for it was our business to go there on fine days to open the windows, and sometimes when we walked that way we went in to rest. How often we had wished it were our own, that we might fit it up to our fancy.

  This spring I was furnished with a new occupation. My Mother told me that my childhood has passed away; I was now seventeen, and must for the future be dressed suitably to the Class young lady into which I had passed. Correct measures were taken of my size and height by the help of Mrs McKenzie who was not entirely rusted in her old art, and these were sent to the Miss Grants of Kinchurdy at Inverness, and to Aunt Leitch at Glasgow. I was so extremely pleased; I was always fond of being nicely dressed, but when the various things ordered arrived, my feelings rose to delight. We had hitherto, my sisters and myself, been all suited alike. In the summers we wore pink gingham or nankin frocks in the morning, white in the afternoon. Our common bonnets were of coarse straw lined and trimmed with green, and we had tippets to all our frocks. The best bonnets were of finer straw, lined and trimmed with white, and we had silk spencers of any colour that suited my Mother’s eye. In the winter we wore dark stuff frocks, black and red for a while—the intended mourning for the king. At night always scarlet stuff with bodices of black velvet and tucks of the same at the bottom of the petticoat. While in England our wraps were in the pelisse form and made of cloth, with beaver bonnets; the bonnets did in the highlands, but on outgrowing the pelisses they were replaced by clokes with hoods, very comfortable in our harsh climate, made of tartan spun and dyed by Jenny Dairy, the red dressed tartan of our clan, the set2 anciently belonging to the Grants. Our habits were of the green tartan, now commonly known by our name, first adopted by us when the Chief raised the 42nd regiment; it was originally Rifle corps, and the bright red of the belted plaid being too conspicuous, that colour was left out in the tartan wove for the soldiers; thus it gradually got into use in the Clan, and goes still by the name of the Grant or 42nd tartan. I retained none of my old attire but my bonnets, my cloke and my habits. All the rest was divided between my sisters and I now burst out full blown into the following wardrobe.

  Two or three gingham dresses of different colours very neatly made with frills, tucks, flounces, etc. Two or three cambrick muslins in the same style with embroidery upon them, and one pale lilack silk, pattern a very small check, to be worn on very grand occasions. My first silk gown, answering to the boots of the brothers, then, not now—chits of any age are silked and booted long before they oug
ht to be much to their own loss, as they will come to think when in their turn they will be called on to provide the same. A pink muslin and a blue muslin for dinner, both prettily trimmed, and some clear and some soft muslins, white of course, with sashes of different colours tyed at one side in two small bows with two very long ends. In the bright, glossy, pale auburn hair no ornament was allowed but natural flowers. The gowns, very much flounced some of them, were not unlike what we wear now, only, the petticoats were scanty and the waists short, so short as to be most extremely disfiguring. The best bonnet was white chip trimmed with white satin and very small, very pale, blush roses, and the new spencer was of blush rose pink. Then there were pretty gloves, neat shoes, silk neckerchiefs, and a parasol—just fancy my happiness, I that had been kept so completely as a child, was in fact so childish, so young of my age in every respect, all at once to come out in this style, it was enough to turn my head and so perhaps it would have done but for two or three circumstances. The drawing room was so dull that, after a few stately days spent there in my new dignity, I slid back again to my sisters in the Schoolroom, undeterred from pursuing such studies as I liked and walking out as before by the foolish sneers and taunts of poor Miss Elphick, who, with the weak jealousy of an inferiour mind, chafed extremely at losing a pupil; and after all, it was only losing unlimited authority over the pupils. Next, it was not very easy to dress myself in my finery up in my corner of the barrack room, where at my toilette table I could hardly stand upright, and it was very difficult to carry my flounces and myself in safety down the narrow turning trap stair leading to the passage opening onto the principal staircase. Also, having no wardrobe, no hanging wardrobe, my dresses were kept in a trunk; the one I wanted generally somehow being at the bottom, and so troublesome to get at. Besides all this, my father had taken the opportunity of a quiet opening of the summer to take me through a short course of mathematicks. We went regularly over the first three books of Euclid, applying all the rules and some of the problems as we went on. The reason of his adding this then unusual science, or an idea of it, to his daughter’s acquirements was this.

  I could never either in conversation or by letter interest my Aunt Frere in the improvements at Rothiemurchus. She said it was all very proper, very necessary, very inevitable, but not agreeable. She liked the highlands as she had known them—primitive, when nobody spoke English, when all young men wore the kilt, when printed calicoes had never been seen, when there was no wheaten bread to be got, when she and Aunt Mary slept in two little closets in the old part of the house just big enough to hold them, and not big enough to hold any of their property, imperials3 in the long garret acting as their wardrobes, when there was no tidy kitchen range, no kitchen even beyond the black hut, no neat lawn, but all the work going forward about the house, the maids in the broom island with kilted coats dancing in the tubs upon the linen, and the Laird worshipped as a divinity by every human being in the place. It was all very correct, the encrease of comfort and the gradual enlightenment etc., but it was not the highlands. Old feudal affection would die out with the old customs and the old prejudices, and that picturesque district would just become as prosaic as her meadows in Hertfordshire. To prove to her that life could still be happier among our mountains than elsewhere, progress notwithstanding, I thought I would keep a journal for a while with a regular history of our doings, great and small, and send it to her, partly to convince her of errour, partly to exercise my own love of scribbling, my pleasure in recurring thus to all I had noted with my quick eyes and ears. We of this sort of temperament cannot help noting down our sensations; it is meat and drink to our busy minds, a safety valve to the brain, I really believe, essential to its well being. Our descendants can very easily put our observations in the fire should they be too dull to comprehend the value of them.

  Well, I had sent my journal to Aunt Lissy, and she had read it with great pleasure, and so had Uncle George and Uncle Bartle, we called them all Uncles and so had my father one afternoon at Hampstead, and he thought the little lady’s wings wanted clipping. A walk along the flowdyke, where the plantation on either hand three feet high had grown up during my march, arched overhead, concealed the sun’s rays, and only here and there revealed the opposite banks, was, though an acknowledged prevision, rather a flight. And a salmon fishing taking up several pages with the river and its ripples, the leaps and pulls and darts of the fish, the wonderful skill of the fisherman with his rod made of the handle of a sweeping broom added to by himself; the crowd around, the sky overhead, a breeze of course, cattle, nut trees, and what not, so bewildered him, unused to that poetick or portraitick style of writing, it was not known at that period, that he judged the wisest thing to be done with so imaginative a brain was to square it a bit by rule and compass. The necessity of proving all that was advanced, of proving step by step, too, as we went along, would he believed strengthen the understanding sufficiently to give it power over the fancy. I don’t think he was wrong, and what an entrancing study, I grieved to the heart when the arrival of the Autumn Company put a stop to our happy hour of mathematicks.

  Shirt making is a good substitute for Euclid, shirt making as my Mother taught the art, cutting with such accuracy, fitting to a nicety, all methodically prepared, placed, finished, in a regular order—it was a lesson in itself.

  A good deal of quiet gaiety took place this autumn. We had our usual relay; Sandy Grant from Garmouth, lame James Grant, Glenmoriston’s uncle, Mr and Mrs Lauder, some of the Cumming Gordons, in great glee at Edwina’s marriage to Mr Miller, Lord Glenlee’s4 son, a perfect fool, and we had Anne Grant, Glen’s sister, and her husband Roderick McKenzie of Flowerburn, rather a good looking man, but stupid, quite as silent as his wife; during the two days they spent with us we hardly ever heard the sound of either voice, I think. Glen himself married this same year—very unfortunately—a cousin—rather pretty—very silly—of late years very eccentrick—never a fit companion for him. My father and mother were exceedingly grieved at this connexion. He was too young, at any rate, just of age and had he waited a while would probably have chosen very differently. They were near a week with us on their way home to Invermoriston after the wedding. Logie and Mrs Gumming were not with us; Alexander was for some time; he rode up on his pony, a fine handsome boy, in deep mourning for his father, who had died suddenly under painful circumstances. A publick meeting on some kind of County business had been held at Nairn, to be followed as a matter of course by a dinner; Logie was expected, and not arriving, the meeting had to proceed without him, and so had the dinner. The master of the hotel was a capital cook, famous above all things for dressing mushrooms well. This was a favourite dish of Logie’s, and Logie being a favourite himself, the Landlord reserved some portion for him, keeping it hot in the brass or copper skillet he had cooked it in. Logie did come, accounting in some manner for his delay, and he ate the mushrooms, was taken ill shortly after, every symptom was that of poison, and he died in great agony before the morning. His head was no loss, but his heart was, for he was kind to everybody, and was long regretted by his neighbourhood. His very clever wife deluded herself with the idea of his great good sense, not a brilliant man she would say but excellent judgement, just the very quality she wanted for he could say a smart word occasionally and never was known to act wisely, yet when some opinion she advanced was contra verted, she has been known to imagine she silenced all argument by ‘Mr Cumming thinks so, I assure you!’

  Mr and Mrs Dunbar Brodie came as usual from Coulmonie, she riding on her gray pony, he driving all the luggage in a gig, flageolet included; and we went to the lake and rowed on the water and played to the echo, and then she measured all the rooms. Mr and Mrs Cooper paid their yearly visit; we all liked her and the Bellevilles came often; I don’t know how many more, Dr Gordon, William, much improved we thought, Sir Robert Ainslie and so on; also Mrs Gillio, with her pretty little dark daughter and her Hindoo maid. She was the daughter of Major Grant of Craggan, whom the fortunate General Willia
m had educated and sent for to India. She had come home with her children, and had thought it right to visit the north. She was an excellent, unpretending, sensible woman, must have been very pretty, too, though at this time that was passed. She went to see all her poor relations more than once, had brought useful presents for them, and left a little money with them. Her Indian attendant was a great amusement to us. We made her describe her country in her broken English, and shew us how she put on her curious dress, the poor woman felt the cold badly and soon went back to her own warm climate. Our people all thought Mrs Gillio’s husband must be black too, as she had married him in India.

  Before Mrs Gillio had left the Doune, the Marquis and Marchioness of Huntly reached Kinrara. We gave them a few days to settle before calling, but might have spared our delicacy, for the following morning a great racket was heard at the ferry close to the house, and presently the very peculiar laugh of the Marquis. Soon he appeared at the window in his old shabby shooting dress and one of his queer hats, without gloves, calling, in the voice we knew well upon my father and mother to come out, he had brought his wife to visit them. And there she was, like another Cinderella, in a beautiful baby phaeton drawn by four goats. The pretty animals were harnessed with red ribbons, and at every hornèd head there ran a little footpage, these fairy steeds being rather unruly. The whole equipage had been brought over in our small passenger boat. No sylph stepped out of this frail machine, but a stout bouncing girl, not tastefully attired, and with a pale broad flat unmeaning face, fair, which he never liked, and stiff—which he could never endure. He got very fond of her, and so did I; the rest of the family never took to her, and my father and mother remembering her predecessor, the beautiful brilliant Duchess, could not avoid making disadvantageous comparisons. Kinrara too was so different, a more elevated and a very stupid society, dull propriety, regularity, ceremony. There was a feast of food, but not of reason; a flow of wine, but not of soul. I cannot wonder that they sighed over the change and thought with regret over the bright spirits departed.