The Jewel Read online

  ‘If ye thought ought of me, ye wadnae hurt my dog!’ he said.

  And she answered him boldly enough, ‘I wadnae think much of you at any rate, Rab Mossgiel,’ but she could feel herself blushing even as she said it.

  ‘That’s me tellt,’ he said. And then, ‘But it would be a singular pleasure for this ploughman to kiss you for sure!’ He bowed to her suddenly, mock gallant. ‘My apologies for my dog and your linen, madam!’

  And he was gone, striding onwards in the direction of Gavin Hamilton’s house with the dog at his heels. He was whistling jauntily, not once pausing to look behind him. Oh, a fine conceit of himself that one.

  The young man seemed to be full of self-love, a besetting sin for which James Armour could see no justification whatsoever; a young man whose reputation preceded him. Nobody in authority approved, although the lassies might admire from a distance as lassies always will admire such young men. As Jean found herself gazing after him now, and admiring this dangerous young man with jet black hair, snowy white wool stockings and a fine plaid, the colour of the woods in autumn.

  The words of the song came unbidden into her head: ‘When my ploughman comes hame at e’en, he’s often wet and wearie. Cast aff the wet, put on the dry, and gae to bed my dearie.’

  She shook the sheet, impatient with herself as much as with him.

  It meant nothing. He would have said as much to any young woman.

  Chapter Two

  Fancy Plaid and Fancy Manners

  Snaw-white stockings on his legs

  And siller buckles glancin,

  A guid blue bonnet on his head

  And O! But he was handsome.

  She had heard her father and mother talking about the Burns family, talking about the farm, how for all that Robert Burns was friendly with the nabbery, no good would come of the move because Mossgiel lay high up on a ridge of land. Winters and summers alike had been cold and wet of late, and the two lads would struggle with the clay. Although Gavin Hamilton was supposed to be a friend to the poor, he was not above renting out his land to be improved by the toil of others. Daddie Auld was right when he said it was ‘aye the poor who maintained the poor’ in his parish. A good judge of men, James Armour had also heard that the eldest of the Mossgiel brothers suffered intermittent ill health, even though he looked like a strapping lad: fainting fits, aches and pains and all manner of other ailments that James had no patience with in a man.

  ‘Women’s ailments,’ he said. ‘He’s no farmer, no farmer at all. An idler and a ne’er-do-weel with nothing at all to recommend him.’

  Jean was forced to agree with her parents. Even if she had wanted to say something kindly about Rab Mossgiel – and perhaps she did – she didn’t dare. Her father was softer with her than with anyone else in the house, including her mother. All the same, and though she wouldn’t say so, Jean thought that Rab may have something to recommend him. It was mostly to do with his appearance. You couldn’t help but notice him. He seemed to make an effort to stand out, and that was not well received in a town where an observance of all the conventions, as well as a careful avoidance of anything that might be labelled scandal, was considered praiseworthy and prudent. Tall poppies were ruthlessly cut down, and Rab was a very tall poppy. He wore his black hair longer than most. Her father was right about that, although it didn’t infuriate Jean as it clearly infuriated James. Rab tied it behind with a ribbon, as nobody else in the parish did, an Edinburgh fashion and one that James thought was more fit for a lassie. As far as James Armour was concerned these signs betokened a young man with a high opinion of himself for no good cause that he himself could see. Too clever for his own good, thought James.

  It seemed that there were gentlemen, some of them very fine gentlemen indeed, who did value the lad’s company and that mostly because he had come to the parish with a reputation as something of a poet. It was not unusual. There were other lads and old men too who fancied themselves as poets. One of them, Saunders Tait, a Tarbolton tailor and a man of some means, disapproved of Rab and indeed his whole family, whom he seemed determined to tar with the same brush as the son. In fact, Tait disapproved of them so violently and so jealously that he had written and circulated more than one piece of insulting verse. In Tait’s eyes the family could do nothing right, and when he heard of it, this was one more thing to make Jean’s father disapprove of the incomer.

  ‘Too clever by half,’ said James Armour. ‘See what happens when you draw attention to yourself?’

  Rab’s reputation with the lassies had also come before him, and that did him no credit either. The truth was that James and Mary had their hearts set on a good marriage for Jean. A weaver, perhaps. The weavers did well for themselves and, although being the wife of a weaver meant hard work and long hours, the families were generally very comfortably off. Weavers were good providers too: independent, well educated men. They made good husbands. There was a lad called Rab Wilson whom James seemed to approve of, as much as he could bring himself to approve of any potential suitor for his darling ewe lamb. Wilson was a sober, clean living, kind hearted man. He’d gone to Paisley to make his fortune at the loom, learning new ways of working from the more experienced men there. He had a good head on his shoulders, and Jean’s father would be pleased if Rab Wilson might decide to come courting her. Maybe he would, one day. Maybe she wouldn’t object. She liked him well enough, but she was in no hurry, and for the present, out of sight was very much out of mind.

  The lassies, meanwhile, had talked about the newcomer among themselves, but their conversations were quite different from those Jean listened to at home. Jean’s friend, Helen Miller, fancied that Rab Mossgiel favoured her and maybe he did. But there were those who said that he favoured any lass at all who was half-way pretty and besides, he was still seeing buxom Betty Paton.

  ‘He’s a lad who can make you laugh,’ Helen Miller said, blushing as she said it. ‘And there’s something fine about a lad who can make you laugh.’

  Jean agreed with her. She had long ago reached the conclusion that Rab Wilson, the weaver, whatever his excellent qualities, was not a man to make anybody laugh very much. He had been known to chide her for singing on the Sabbath day. In the most gentle way possible, of course, and perhaps he was right. Still, Jean sang as the birds sing, and couldn’t help but think that her maker, having created the voice as well as the lass, would not be offended to hear it on His special day. She had a feeling that Rab Mossgiel would chide nobody for singing on the Sabbath. In fact he looked like a man who might do a wee bit of singing on the Sabbath himself, and it might not just be the psalms in the kirk either.

  He was taller than many a lad in the village and handsome enough, although not just as handsome as Rab Wilson. All the lassies said as much whenever they spoke of him, and they spoke of him often, intrigued by the stranger, the interlowper in their midst. They were forced to admit that he had the look of what he was: a tenant farmer, with broad shoulders and coarse hands and a ploughman’s slight stoop. He was a wee thing coarse about the face too, although Helen Miller was quick to say that his manners, when he chose, could be as close to those of a gentleman as made no difference. The others did not entirely believe her, wondering just how much conversation she might really have had with him. But even though Rab was mourning his father, he had already made his presence felt in the town.

  It was known that he was still walking out with Betty Paton of Largieside from time to time, and nobody could say that walking out was the whole of it with a lad like Rab Burns. Betty was big and bonnie, and she was as strong as two young men put together, so she would make a good wife for a farmer. Jean and her friends had laughed about it, giggling about Rab Mossgiel and Betty Paton, wondering what they got up to, and where they did it, if they were doing it – behind which hedgerow or under which hayrick? They all wondered what would happen now that Rab was his own man, with a farm to mind and a family to keep, but with
no stern father to keep him in check. It was well known even in Mauchline that Rab’s mother, Agnes Broun, was very fond of Betty Paton. Incautiously, she had confessed as much to one of the gossips, wishing that her son would marry the lass. But that being the case, thought Jean, why had Betty not come to work at Mossgiel, now that the family had moved in? Jean could only assume that Rab didn’t want what his mother wanted and that would surely be the end of it. By reputation at least, Rab Mossgiel was not a man to do as he was told. Not by anyone.

  In point of fact, Jean knew Betty, although they were not friends. Everyone knew everybody else, knew their business, their faults and failings. There were few secrets in the parish but Betty and Jean were not at all the same and never had been. Jean’s father had a position to maintain in the town. Betty was a dairymaid. There was no shame in being a dairymaid, of course; Rab’s mother and sisters worked in the dairy at Mossgiel. His younger brother, Gilbert, was noted for the sweet milk cheese he had learned how to make, instructing his mother and his sisters in the art. But Betty had a voice and a laugh that you could hear halfway across the town and maybe even the parish. There were no airs and graces with Betty. Whatever she was thinking, she would open her mouth and out it would come. She would say what she felt. If she liked you, she would let you know. If she disliked you, she would let you know, but even more loudly and crudely, laughing to drive the point home. And her laughter would raise the dead to join in the fun.

  When Rab’s younger sisters could be persuaded to say anything at all about her, which was not often, they said that she was ‘still half demented with love for oor Rab’. Poor Betty, thought Jean, although she was not sure why that word came so readily into her mind. It never had done until now with regard to Betty Paton, of whom Jean was always a bit afraid on account of the caustic tongue and the loud voice. Poor Betty. Half demented with love for Rab Burns of Mossgiel. Who would ever want to find herself in that position, with, maybe, a baby on the way, a whaup in the nest, which was what the gossips were whispering. But that was all hearsay, and Betty was just the same as she had ever been, a big sonsie lassie, but certainly no plumper than she had been, so perhaps it was just talk. All the same, Jean found herself wondering if a lad who aye had his nose in a book would be contented to be married to a lassie who had never even learned her letters.

  Not that there were many books in the Armour household, either. It was Jean’s father who had first taught her to read and write. Her mother had taught her to sing and to dance her first steps, but her father had taught her her first letters when she was too small even for the school. Later, clutching her penny in her hand and a piece of peat or wood for the fire, she had gone to the Mauchline school with the other children, where Andrew Noble, the session clerk, attempted to improve on what her father had begun. She had never taken to that very much. The schoolroom was chilly and bleak, in spite of the fire for which there were never enough peats or coals. Not all fathers were such good providers as James, and Andrew never turned anyone away, with or without penny or peat. The room smelled of unclean clothes and unwashed bodies. The damp rose from the flagstones, summer and winter alike. And the fire smoked. Once, she came back with flea bites on her legs and her father had words with Noble. After that, they sat her elsewhere, not next to the lass that had carried the fleas in with her. Her mother would cover her dark curls with a linen cap and tell her to keep her head away from the other children. But once or twice she brought lice home with her anyway and had to suffer the indignity of the fine-tooth comb tugging through her curls, making her cry.

  ‘Here,’ her father had said. ‘Give it to me, Mary. I’ll do it.’

  He was always very gentle with her, back then.

  Andrew Noble was a good man but a stern one. She preferred the lessons from her father. James Armour was more than content to sit with his Jeany in the evenings and teach her to read some of her bible, first and foremost, and then to form letters for herself. They would use a big piece of Ballachulish slate of which there was no shortage in his line of work, and a bit of chalk, so that everything could be rubbed out and you could begin again. Mistakes didn’t matter.

  ‘See,’ he would say to her when she began to cry because she couldn’t get it right. ‘You just rub it all away, Jeany, and you’re left with a clean slate so that you can start over again!’

  She had a memory of sitting with him by the light of the fire, all cooried in – she must have been only four or five – and his hand enfolding hers, the slate resting on his knee. She was fidgeting as usual and the sharp edge of the slate was digging into her leg.

  ‘Sit at peace, hen!’ he said. ‘Can ye no sit at peace?’

  He moved the slate to make her comfortable and planted a kiss on the top of her head lest she should think he was really cross with her. ‘Now, let’s begin again,’ he said. And then he was forming the letter J with its curly top and bottom and saying, ‘Here we go, making the wee piggy’s tail. J for my Jeany.’

  Once she had a rudimentary grasp of the mysteries of letters and words from her father and later on from the school, bills of sale from the business were pressed into service. James Armour had an office in the low thatched house next door. When she was a child, there were lodgers in the rest of this cottage, but later it was where Jean’s elder brother John and his wife lived, along with two of her other brothers, James and young Adam. All the brothers worked for their father as soon as they were old enough. It was there too that James Armour kept his business papers in a heavy wooden desk, one that he could keep locked, keeping his affairs safe from prying eyes. He would bring a few goose feather quills, a pot of ink and some old bills through to their kitchen in the bigger house, so that Jean could practise on the back of them by the light of the fire. This was how she learned her letters, not without a certain amount of trouble, but she didn’t remember any great difficulty either. Perhaps it was just that he was patient with her mistakes. Gruffly patient, almost ashamed of his partiality. Like most of the fathers in the town, it did not come easily to him.

  There were few books in the house beyond the heavy family bible and the bonnie Old and New Testaments her mother took to the kirk, a gift from James upon their marriage. But when Jean grew older, some of the lassies managed to acquire novels. From where, she was always unsure and she would never enquire too closely for fear that the supply might dry up. Betty and Helen Miller were the daughters of an innkeeper, and Christina Morton’s father also kept an inn on the Back Causeway, behind the kirk. These lassies saw more strangers than Jean, for the town was a great crossroads for travellers. The change houses were well patronised. These intriguing little books with their tales of forbidden love, romantic trials and tribulations, might be left behind or, so Christina said with a grin, might mysteriously disappear, never to be found again, when some guest had imbibed too freely of the excellent ale on offer. The cadger too would bring tattered copies with him from time to time, picked up along the way from heaven knows where. Some of these tales were written by women. They were not new even then, but they were books of which she knew fine her father would not approve, had he known or guessed what they were about. But he did not know or guess. Such works were beyond the limited compass of his imagination.

  Worldly wise in so many ways, James Armour could scarcely comprehend that any woman could or would write such words and put them out for all to read. The girls would pass the books around, the well thumbed copies practically falling to pieces. Each prized volume would be concealed in a pocket, well out of sight of disapproving elder eyes and then kept under the mattress for a while. Jean remembered sliding the leather bound volumes out, stealthily, late on a summer’s night or early in the morning when a deafening chorus of birds had woken her, and peering at the pages by the light filtering through the casement window, anxious not to wake her sisters who could never be trusted not to give the game away. They were much too young to keep secrets.

  Chapter Three

 
The Dancing

  O leave novels, ye Mauchline belles,

  Ye’re safer at your spinning-wheel;

  Such witching books are baited hooks

  For rakish rooks, like Rob Mossgiel.

  Some months passed before Jean had occasion to speak to Rab Mossgiel again. She would see him sometimes and would be intrigued by the gossip that clung to him like peat smoke to a woollen coat. It was inevitable in a place as close-knit as this one. As the summer progressed, she saw him in the town and she saw him in the kirk. She even saw him in Morton’s Ballroom from time to time, where she regularly attended the dancing classes organised by Christina’s father so that the young people could assemble and enjoy themselves under supervision. Her father tolerated rather than approved of it. In reality, these were country dances rather than regular classes, although occasionally some visiting master would teach them new steps or a whole new dance. Morton would ply him with whisky and the dancers would pay him a few coins. There were always older ladies, widow women for the most part, happy to sit and chaperone the dancing while eating and drinking whatever was on offer. They were supposed to make sure that nobody overstepped the bounds of propriety, although the place was so crowded that it was impossible for them to observe everything that went on. Hands might wander when occasion arose and lips might meet, briefly, in the middle of a dance.

  Jean was good at the dancing. She had been light on her feet from early childhood, loving to jig about the kitchen of the house in the Cowgate, and now she had a great memory for the figures of the dance. The ballroom was a busy place, with a wooden floor that magnified the sound of their shoes and the heavy boots of the men as they jumped and spun. You had to wear shoes or boots or your toes might be flattened by over-enthusiastic neighbours and partners. The young people were crushed together in there like so many peas in a pod. In summer it was hot, and everyone was beaded with a fine layer of sweat. The girls had it easier in their cotton or muslin gowns, although even they had damp patches under their arms and around their breasts, but the young men in their best or second best linen shirts, their woollen coats and breeches, had a hard time of it. Morton would try to disguise the smell of the place with sweet herbs, but it didn’t always help to mask the scent of perspiring bodies, damp linen and wool, and dirty feet. Morton would engage a couple of fiddlers; one would take over when another became weary and they would be paid a penny a reel, or whatever dance was popular at the time.