Colonel Pennington announced that he was engaged to dine with his brother in London on Christmas Day, so the wedding was fixed for the 20th of December 1825.
It was a cold, dull morning. I had been up all night preparing the breakfast, for our upper servants were gone, had been gone since the spring. Miss Elphick, poor soul, had come to be present at the first marriage amongst us. She left us when we left Edinburgh, she had been with the Kirkman Finlays in Glasgow. She assisted my labours by torrents of tears. The Bellevilles were the only guests, Mrs Macpherson so sad. The ceremony was performed in the Library by Mr Fyvie, the young episcopal clergyman from Inverness. My Mother’s whole face was swelled from weeping; I was a ghost; William very grave; my poor father, the unhappy cause of our sorrow, did look heart broken when he gave that bright child of his away. The Bridegroom wore his Artillery uniform, which became his slight figure well; he did not look near his age, and he was so happy though so ugly. The Bride stood beside him in her beauty, tall, fresh, calm, composed. It was to be done, and she was doing it without one visible regret. ‘I will’ was so firmly said, I started. What happened after I never felt. Mrs Macpherson just whispered to me, ‘Help them, Eliza,’ and I believe I did. I tried I know; dear, kind Mrs Macpherson, what a friend she was, never tiring, always ready, so wise too. The breakfast went off well. The Colonel was so gay, he made his little speeches so prettily, his wife looked quite proud of him. He took leave of the humbler friends in the hall so kindly, and of us so affectionately, that we all relented to him before we parted. We all went down to the boat; the gentlemen crossed the water. On the gravelly shingle beyond was the London built chariot and four horses, the man and the maid, and the two postillions with large favours, a mob of our people round the carriage raising such a shout as their pride—ay, and their blessing—was driven away. She never forgot the home of her fathers, never lost sight of her Duchus; her protecting hand has been the one faithfully held over ‘the great plain of the fir trees’ from that hour to the day of her death. She has been the nursing mother to all our people, in weal or woe their prop. Beloved every where, she was worshipped there. Doing her duty every where, she has taken the duties of others on herself there. She departed on that wintry day the only unmoved person in the throng; home, to me at least, never seemed like home since.
Colonel Pennington had a hunting box in Leicestershire near the village of Norman ton, where they lived till the spring. He then took a pretty, old fashioned place called Trunkwell, near Reading, which they were very sorry to be obliged to leave in a year after, when they fixed themselves at Malshanger for the rest of his life, near Basingstoke, in the higher part of Hampshire. It was an ugly house, but very roomy, very comfortable. The garden was good, the grounds pretty, plenty of fine trees, the scenery of the neighbourhood interesting and the place interesting. They improved it much during their time in it; both of them had good taste and delighted in a country life. She liked her garden, her horses, her new acquaintance, and was really very happy, though her husband was not a good tempered man, and certainly often forgot that he had married a girl who might almost have been his granddaughter, so that at first they rather hobbled on at times; but with so really good and clever a man, and so admirable a character as hers, these little points soon wore smooth. They were not at first appreciated; the disparity between them made people suppose all could not be right, that she was either mercenary, or the victim of mercenary relations, but as they were better known they were better understood. Few have left a fairer fame in any neighbourhood, respected, loved, regretted, this is how they are spoken of to this day. Annie Need said a bit of bitter fun about Jane’s choice, which she much disapproved. ‘It was his mind,’ said some of us apologetically; ‘she married him for his mind.’ ‘She could not well have had less body then,’ she said tartly enough. Slight as he was, and far from young, he led the Pytchley hunt for many years, he had a fine stud. I think that was the Hunt he belonged to; at any rate Newton Fellowes was the Master.
When the marriage was over. Bride and bridegroom gone, cake cut, guests departed, and my father, my Mother and I were left to spend the remainder of the stern highland winter together, for William went to Edinburgh on business and could not return. Alas! he was imprisoned for debt in the gaol on the Caltonhill. The debt was of his own contracting, for in his College days he had been extravagant; he believed himself to be the heir of wealth, the son of a rich man, and he had the name of a handsome allowance which was never paid him. At the time of the execution of the Trust Deed, he had taken all my father’s debts upon himself, bound himself to pay them, and they were upwards of £60,000. Had he been arrested for one of them, I think it would have killed my father; I never saw him so much affected by any thing that ever happened to him; and my poor Mother, who had so gloried in the noble sacrifice of self her son had made, she sank under this; they were very miserable. The debt could not be paid, even by degrees; the sum allowed for the maintenance of the family and the expenses of the forest work was very small, and there were other creditors who would have come forward with their claims had we been able to satisfy this one. Now I saw the wisdom of Jane’s marriage, her kind husband sent William money. She wrote pleasant letters; the post was our sunlight; it came but three times a week, but such a full bag; the franks permitted a frequent correspondence.5 Jane at Normanton, Mary at Fountain Dale, frequently meeting at the various houses they visited, Aunt Mary from Oxford where she was now established in a small house she had furnished. Other letters and the newspapers, all helped to brighten the long evenings. Mr Caw always came in on the post nights with his little bits of gossip for my mother. He lived at Polchar in his capacity of book keeper, which office he filled remarkably well.
My Mother never went out; my father and I were never kept in, for though cold, it was sunny; hard frost gave us power to walk miles without fatigue. Yes—twice there were heavy falls of snow, which blocked up the hill road; the mail coach could not run, it and the unfortunate passengers were dug out of deep wreaths, and we had no post. So my father took to reading aloud while my mother and I worked. We had given up crossing the hall to the dining room; dinner was laid on a narrow table in the lobby, and wheeled into the Library, my Mother being unfit for the change of apartments. She was well cloked and shawled when she went to bed.
Our establishment consisted of poor Robert Allan, who was butler and footman and gamekeeper, and never could be persuaded to leave a falling house. He had a fault, a serious one, he tippled; but the man was so good, so worthy, it had to be overlooked and he was borne with to the end. Whiskey and all, he never left the family. The cook was Nelly, invaluable Nelly; she had been kitchen maid under Mrs Watling, and now, by the help of my Cuisinière bourgeoisie, the best french cookery book ever written, she and I together turned out little dinners that really gave an appetite to my poor father and mother, both of them rather dainty. I always dressed in the evening; it pleased them. We had a bright fire, and we made conversation, and sometimes William Cameron spent the evening with us, or rather with my father in the Study; there was always a bed ready for him. William, my brother, wrote cheerfully; his young friends all came to see him, and the Gibson Craigs provided him with any amount of luxuries from Riccarton. Before long he was released; nothing could be made of his confinement, so he was let to return home a little before my father departed for London about Easter. It was a great relief to get William back. I had done my best to carry out his orders, but the distances, the wintry weather, and the difficulty of procuring either money or food, made the position painful.
In the summer of 1826 my father brought Mary back; the fine weather revived our spirits, her cheerful gossip amused our poor mother, and the farm was selling eggs, and wool, and fruit, to the shooting lodges. We had no visitors this season, not even the Grants, but land Aunt Mary had set us up. She had married a second time. Doctor Bourne, a rich man of great repute as a physician in Oxford.6 She sent my Mother £60. We had, when my father went to London, three wedde
rs for our supply of meat; we bought a score now, so with the poultry yard, the garden, and the river, we did well till the winter—such a winter, our last in the dear Duchus.
We were quite alone, my mother, my sister Mary, and myself, William off and on as business required; it was a severe winter. My mother kept her room until late in the day; Mary was her maid, and such a tender one. I had my tartan cloke, with a hood and a pair of jail boots, and trotted across the yard to the cellar, and down to the farm to act housekeeper there, then back to the kitchen to manage the dinner. Fine education this, and we were happy, though our troubles were great. We had mutton enough, thanks to dear Aunt Mary, and we sold enough of other things to buy our groceries from Robby Cumming. Inverness had refused to honour my orders; heavy bills were there unpaid. Then there were the servants’ wages; William paid the outsiders, but there was nothing for the insiders; how good they were, waiting so patiently, asking for their own as if they were begging for a favour. There had been good stores in the house, but they were vanishing. It was hard to bear up amid such perplexities. In a happy hour I opened my heavy heart to the very kindest friend any one ever had, the Lady Belleville. No good could come of a sinking spirit, the back must bear its burden. Cold and harsh as the world thought Mrs Macpherson, she had a warm heart, with a cool judgment, and untiring zeal in the service of those she loved.
She proposed my writing for the press. I had tried this the winter before, that heavy winter, wrote what I thought a lively little paper, ‘An old story,’ from hints furnished by the vanity of our poor cousin Edmund Ironside after a visit of his to the hair dresser in Inverness, copied it fair, and sent it to Blackwood in a fictitious name, desiring an answer to be sent to Mr Sidey the postmaster at Perth, where our bag was made up, there being no post office for years after at Lynwuilg. Day after day did I watch the boy who went to meet the Coach, having the key of the bag, I had no fear of discovery. No answer ever came, the Editor probably never looked at the paper and so lost a story that would have told well in his magazine, for ushered into the library world afterwards by Belleville, it was favourably received by his friend a Mr Fraser, some way connected with the press and brought me £3. It did not go alone, Mary and I between us wrote a bundle of rubbish for the ‘Inspector,’ and received £40 in return.7
We wrote at night in the Barrack room, for we had been obliged to leave our more comfortable apartments on account of the state of the roof over that end of the old house. Whenever it either rained or thawed we had five or six cascades pouring into tubs set round the walls to catch the water. The Barrack room was inconvenient too; the little crooked staircase which led up to it was lighted by a large pane of glass in the roof, a sky light not very tightly fixed. Several times during the snow storms we had to wade through a wreath of snow on the steps underneath it, pretty deep occasionally, so that we were wetted above the ankles; but we did not mind, we took off our shoes and stockings, and dried our feet by a good fire which we had provided for ourselves. Fuel being scarce, we gathered in the plantation as many fallen sticks as, assisted by a few peats taken from the large stacks at the farm, gave us a nice bright fire for our mid night labours. Bits of candle stuck in succession on a save-all, manufactured by our selves out of a nail and a piece of tin, performed the part of lamp, and thus enlightened, we wrote away.
Before Mary came home, it was rather lonely up there away from every body, but not dull—where there is an object, the means of attaining that object become a pleasure and in an old patched dressing gown with an old shawl over it, my feet on the warm hearth stone, and two or three potatoes roasting in the ashes, I passed many a happy hour. We worked late, for the Highland winters have very dark mornings, so we rose late. Mary’s papers were very clever, very original, they required condensing and a few grammatical corrections, but in themselves they were well deserving of the praise they received.
Dear old Barrack room, the scene of some sorrow, and many pleasures. In our younger days, in John’s holidays, we used to give private entertainments there far away from molestation. We contrived a fire, made coffee, boiled eggs, had bread and cheese and butter and porridge. John was the Caterer, and no body ever refused him any thing. How merry we were, hot days or cold ones. Years after, when he was Governour of Jamaica, in one of the few letters he wrote me he recalled the gay doings of the Barrack room, the more enjoyable from their mystery.
When Mrs Macpherson sent us our £40, she sent us also by her Macpherson boy, on his shaggy pony called Rob Roy, a Times newspaper in which was a most favourable criticism of our contributions to the Inspector, especially of Mary’s ‘Country campaign of a man of fashion.’ We were wild; first we skipped, then we laughed, then we sat down and cried. In this state our only thought was, ‘We must tell mamma.’
She was alone at work in the Library. We laid our Bank notes before her, presented the praising newspaper and Mrs Macpherson’s note. We had dreaded her anger, for she was very proud. Poor woman! that was over; she had suffered too much. ‘Dear good children,’ was all she said, and then she cried as we did, but happiness prevailed. We had all the fun in the world arranging how to spend our treasure. We were so very badly off for necessaries, we had difficulty in settling what was most wanted. We had no walking shoes. It was amusing to see us in our house shoes—old satin slippers of all colours patched at the sides, looking a little more respectable after we learned to dye them with ink; shabby dress gowns, because we had no plainer for common; the two servant maids as shabby as our selves, saying nothing, good creatures, and very grateful for the share of wages we were now enabled to give them. We three, my Mother, Mary and I, faithfully keeping our secret, for had William known it he would have borrowed some of it, he was so hard up himself, to keep the work going. We thought it best to save a little, have a nest egg, for the hour of need might come again; but it never came, thank God, and the kind friends raised up for us—but I am running on too fast, and my mother thought a few pounds should be spent on me, to enable me to accept a very kind invitation to Huntly Lodge in the spring. Several pretty dresses had been sent to me as presents and never made up, and white muslin was plenty in Robby Cumming’s shop, so I set out with the kind Bellevilles for Huntly.
I had always liked Lord Huntly; he had known us young people from our birth and liked us and my father and mother were as intimate with him as they had been with his Mother, the beautiful Duchess, our pleasant neighbour for so many summers. He had married late in life, the unfortunate habit of too many young men of fashion. Lady Huntly was an excellent woman. She brought him a very large fortune, a clear business head, good temper, and high principles. She soon set straight all that she had found crooked. She was not handsome, though she had a good figure, a good skin, and beautiful hands—the Brodie face is very short and very flat and very meaningless; but she suited him, every one liked her, and she always liked me, so the fortnight I passed with her was very agreeable. There were several guests in the house, a large dinner party every day, all of the Gordon name, and staying with their Uncle and Aunt were two of the Montagues, the Ladies Caroline and Emily, and Lord Charles Russell. It was an ugly country, the grounds uninteresting, nothing particular to do except the sorting of what became afterwards a very fine collection of shells and minerals, which she afterwards left, with all that remained of her money, to little Brodie of Brodie, her first cousin. She had no children.
Mary had well filled my place at home. She had a genius for management, and she amused my mother with all her forest tales. Newstead was a never failing subject, for there she got among the great people both of them liked. Colonel Wildman was of the household of the Duke of Sussex, belonged to a crack Cavalry Regiment, was very nice, had married his sister to Sir Robert Gardiner, all brothers all up in high places so that the guests at Newstead were mostly of note. Mary had delighted in the sociable life she had led there Of course she found the poor old Doune dull after it; had we not had our writings to occupy us her spirits might have got very low, for her fine
mind was not sufficient for itself; with a spur and a prop she ran lightly through any life, wanting either she failed; but now at home she had both, and well she did her part. She helped me in all my works and helped our mother, and then skipped merrily up at night to the ‘regions of fancy’ in our barrack room.
Memoirs of a Highland Lady Page 62