The Jewel Read online

  Sometimes, as Jean and her partner went down the line, Rab Mossgiel would birl her around and cast her away from him again, and their eyes would meet. Once or twice, she caught him gazing at her, then shaking himself like a dog and turning his attention elsewhere. There wasn’t time for conversation and they could hardly hear each other above the din of fiddles anyway. The more she saw of him, the more she was forced to admit that he was a handsome man with fine dark eyes and long lashes like a girl, but she still thought that he was somebody to be avoided, not to be trusted with the lassies.

  By November of that year, the whole town was buzzing with the news that a whaup truly was in the nest. Betty Paton was with child and the father was Robert Burns in Mossgiel. There were those who avowed they had been right all along, their neighbour Johnnie Dow’s wife for one, although this made Jean smile, since if she had been right all along, Betty’s confinement must have been a prodigiously long one. As it was, the lass was barely showing her shame. In fact Helen Miller refused to believe the rumours for a long while.

  ‘And even if it is true that she’s having a wean, it’s likely somebody else’s,’ she said, robustly. But they all knew that this was because Helen still rather fancied Rab herself. They all did, if the truth be told: the sisters, Helen and Elizabeth Miller, Christina Morton too. The Mauchline belles, Rab called them, well aware of their interest in him. Jean thought it was like setting down a peacock in the middle of a hen coop: so much fuss and consternation. But perhaps he was a fox in peacock feathers. So the fuss and consternation might be justified, although the lasses were too confident, too sure of themselves to feel really threatened.

  Once or twice the gentry would deign to look in when there was dancing in Morton’s Ballroom: generally Gavin Hamilton and his friends. They always arrived late and left early and they would look around them with that expression they so frequently had: one of smiling condescension as though they should be congratulated for being there at all. Jean had heard that Rab Mossgiel was good friends with his landlord, and he certainly seemed at ease in his company. But it was different for the lassies. The nabbery, especially the young men, would be eyeing up the girls in the ballroom, looking not just for the prettiest but for the most compliant, the bold lassie who would return their stare. Which Jean did not. When she was very young, fifteen or so, she had been allowed to go to the dancing with her mother or one of her aunts to supervise. Once, one of the gentlemen had brought his sister and a friend, enviably decked out in the latest fashions, and they had giggled behind their hands all evening, pulling faces at the dancers. The joy had gone out of the dance for Jean, although she couldn’t have explained why she should have been so hurt by the antics of a pair of daft lassies who seemed to lack the sense they were born with.

  One evening, she was in Morton’s Ballroom with her friends when Rab Mossgiel came to the dancing, although he wasn’t in her set. All the folk in his set were laughing uproariously. She wondered what he was saying to them to make them laugh so much. The thought occurred to her that even fashionable ladies would not laugh behind their hands at Rab. They wouldn’t dare. His tongue was his weapon, but so was his verse. He could pin a body to the page. Words were powerful things. But they might laugh with him. Who could help laughing with him?

  This time, though, it was not Rab’s mischief that was causing the laughter. A bat had found its way into the room and was flying back and forth in a panic. It was this, and the reactions of the lassies in particular, as the creature grew weary and swept lower and lower, that was causing so much hilarity. The poor bat was in danger of scorching itself on the lamps, and the lassies were shrieking and trying to protect their heads. The fiddler was resolute and kept on playing although all the sets had become haphazard with arbitrary extra steps and evasions. A few of the lads opened a window and tried to encourage the creature to fly in that direction. Rab fetched his plaid that he had set aside while he danced, and eventually he and John Blane, the Mossgiel farmhand, managed to leap up in concert, brandishing it. The bat, momentarily disorientated by the sudden barrier, veered out of the window. The dancing resumed. Jean thought how light on his feet he was. She regretted that she wasn’t in his set this time. Who could help being curious about such an intriguing lad?

  Later on in the evening, Morton opened the door to let in some air, because the place was stifling and Rab was heard to remark that even wee flying mice were preferable to suffocation. The older ladies sitting around the walls, watching proceedings, were fanning themselves with whatever was to hand. Not all of them had fans and those who had were passing them along the row, or fanning their friends ferociously and wishing they could have worn muslin. One or two had brought posies of dried lavender flowers from their gardens and were holding them up to their noses to counteract the smell of unwashed clothes and rank sweat on leather boots.

  Suddenly there was a commotion. Rab Mossgiel’s dog had come in through the open door, the same dog that had run over Jean’s sheets. Everyone knew he followed his master about like a shadow now, the replacement for poor, poisoned Luath. Everyone knew about that too, and speculation had been rife about the culprit, even here in Mauchline, with some saying it was a rejected suitor of Betty Paton, and some saying it was the jealous would-be poet, Sauny Tait. The new pup had grown over the summer. He was one of those animals with a smiling face. His pink tongue was hanging out, and when the dog saw Rab, he grinned even more widely and rushed towards him, showing all his teeth in an ingratiating smile, the very picture of delight. Rab was dancing, and for a few moments the collie was following the figures of the dance, his plume of a tail waving. He was almost tripping up the dancers, but most of all, he was almost tripping Rab Mossgiel, doing what collies do and staying close to his heel, weaving in and out. Just then the fiddler stopped, the dance ended and Rab bent down to fuss the dog, scratching behind its ears. You could see that a few of the lassies were wishing they were that dog. Jean saw that Rab was glancing over. She could see the line of his gaze and thought that he might be looking at her friend, but Christina turned her head away, deliberately putting her nose in the air. He pushed through the press of people and the dog followed him, panting in the heat.

  ‘He’s aye following me,’ he said to Jean and Christina. ‘I wish I could get a lassie to follow me that way!’

  ‘There’d be no lassie daft enough,’ said Christina, forthright as ever. ‘Well, no lassie that I ken.’

  ‘Do you not? That’s a pity. But I think I might ken one!’ He caught Jean’s gaze and, greatly to her embarrassment, winked at her. ‘Enjoy your dancing, lassies!’

  Then he was off through the door, taking his dog with him.

  ‘I thought he had a lassie to follow him that way,’ said Jean.

  ‘You mean Betty Paton? But he’ll never marry her, not even with the wean.’

  ‘No. I don’t think he will. He’d rather face the cutty stool and the kirk session than marry her. But he’s no denyin’ he’s the father, and he’s looking after the wean. He’s doing that at least.’

  ‘Aye, and that’s better than many a lad.’

  ‘Maybe he fancies you, Chrissie.’

  ‘It was you he winked at, Jean.’

  ‘Aye. Well, a cat may look at a king and even wink at him. But it disnae mean he’ll be wearing the crown any day soon.’

  Chapter Four

  The Rocking

  O, clappin’s guid in Febarwar,

  An kissin’s sweet in May

  But what signifies a young man’s love

  An’t dinna last for ay?

  The Mauchline belles, the witty, well dressed lassies that Rab flirted with and courted light-heartedly by turns, had become friendly with the Mossgiel sisters, which was why they were invited to a ‘rocking’ out at the farmhouse, very early in 1785, not long after Jean’s twentieth birthday. It was that harsh time of year when the ailing tended to die and when all entertainments that i
nvolved light and warmth were welcome. Jean’s father disapproved of the party and would have probably forbidden his daughter from attending if the Miller sisters, Helen and Betty, ably assisted by Christina Morton, had not managed to persuade him. Helen and Betty were well practised at wheedling, and James was as susceptible as the next man. They didn’t mention Rab at all, but spoke of Gilbert Burns in glowing terms. Gilbert was a plain, douce, grave young man, without the obvious charm of his elder brother, as self effacing as Rab was spirited. He seemed to disapprove of the Mauchline belles, but James wasn’t to know that.

  Rockings were intimate celebrations for families and a few friends. Folk would bring a contribution to the feast if they could, especially at this lean time of year, and perhaps a candle too, to add to the light. They would gather beside the kitchen fire, eat and drink, chat, tell tales, sing songs. Each woman would bring her rock, her distaff, with a bundle of flax, and her spindle, so that she could pass the time productively. That way the light wouldn’t be wasted either. There might even be a fiddler. Rab fancied himself as a fiddler although there were better in the village, and probably better even at the Mossgiel rockings. There were most certainly better singers. Rab could just about carry a tune, but that was all.

  The previous autumn, Johnnie Dow, at the Whitefoord Arms, had decided that a singing school might bring in a few extra pennies. He always had an eye to a profit. Morton’s dancing school had done well, and Johnnie ‘Pigeon’ Dow had long been pondering a way of competing with him. In an inspired moment he had engaged the services of a fashionable singing master from Ayr, and some of the young people from the town were quick to take advantage of the classes, held in an upstairs room at the Whitefoord Arms.

  Jean was an enthusiastic pupil. Her father thought it much more respectable than the dancing and had encouraged her to go. She lived so close that attending meant going across the alleyway at the side of her house and in at the back door of the Arms. Singing was a perfectly respectable pastime for any young lady, but all the same it was a relief to be able to avoid the prying eyes of the Cowgate. It wasn’t that folk disapproved, so much as that they liked to know everything that was going on, had an insatiable curiosity about everyone. And the old men were just as bad as the old wives, talking behind their hands and exaggerating everything as the tale was passed on. One day they had had one of her father’s workers, Hugh Rodger, ‘Big Shug’ they called him, sick, dying, stone dead and on the way to his funeral, all in the space of one day, when he had taken nothing more than a chill that had kept him indoors. Even her father had been forced to laugh at that one.

  ‘It was a gey close-run thing!’ he said to them that night. ‘I was on the way to offer my condolences to the widow when I met Mr Auld and he told me the true tale!’

  Jean soon became the acknowledged star of the singing class. She had a fine memory for all the old ballads her mother and grandmother had taught her, words and music both. She even knew the names of most of the tunes. There was nobody to match her and the tall, slender singing master seemed half in love with his star pupil, although she did nothing to encourage him. Far from it. She and the other lassies would giggle over his blushes and cow’s eyes, the way he stammered whenever he had occasion to speak to her, but he was by no means a handsome man. It was rumoured that he had a wife and five children in Ayr, with another one on the way, and that the wife had to take in sewing because the singing didn’t pay too well. His shirts were always threadbare, and they supposed that his wife was too busy to attend to her husband’s linen. John Blane, one of the farm servants at Mossgiel, had a decent tenor voice that he was never shy of using, and he also attended these classes whenever his duties at the farm permitted.

  At the Mossgiel rocking there was another singer, a visiting cousin of the Burns family who was said to have a fine tenor voice and well he knew it. He would not sing unless the company had fallen silent, and then he stood with his hands folded together, gazing into the distance. Rab hated pretension of any sort and was inclined to chuckle over his cousin’s absurd solemnity, but had to acknowledge that the man had a good voice. Still, he moved to the back of the room so that nobody would notice if he started to laugh.

  It was when the cousin had finished his latest dignified performance that John Blane shouted out, ‘Miss Armour! Will you not give us a song?’

  Jean was not particularly shy of singing, but the room was crowded and the previous singer had been so sure of himself that she shook her head, suddenly diffident. ‘I’m not sure what to sing!’ she said.

  ‘Perhaps the lassie is shy,’ said the cousin, patronisingly.

  Blane persisted. ‘Miss Armour, you have the voice of a lintie, so you do. Sing whatever you like!’

  ‘Give us an auld ballad,’ came from the gloom at the back of the room. ‘D’you ken Tam Lin, Miss Armour?’

  She recognised the voice as Rab’s. ‘Aye, I do.’

  ‘Then sing Tam Lin for us.’

  She put down her spindle, stood, gathering herself together, summoning her breath along with the words and the story, gazing across the assembled faces to where Rab leaned lazily against the wall, arms folded, half smiling at her.

  She sang:

  ‘O I forbid ye, maidens a’

  That wear gold on your hair

  To come or gae by Carterhaugh,

  For young Tam Lin is there.’

  It was an ancient ballad, one that Jean seemed to have known her whole life, perhaps because her mother had sung it to her in her cradle. It was a song full of mystery and magic and unanswered questions, about Janet, who finds herself with child, and then bravely rescues her lover from the Queen of Faery.

  ‘First she let the black pass by,

  And syne she let the brown;

  But quickly she ran to the milk-white steed,

  And pu’d the rider down.’

  His eyes never left her face the whole time. When she emerged from the world of the song, he was still gazing at her, still with that half smile.

  ‘Miss Armour,’ he said, from the back of the room. ‘I think you have the finest and purest wood-note wild I have ever heard in all my born days.’

  He turned away to spare her blushes, but later in the evening, when the air in the parlour had become as stuffy and smoky as Morton’s Ballroom in the middle of a dance, she slipped on her shawl and stepped outside the back door for a moment, only to find him standing right beside her, wrapped in his plaid. The contrast between the warm room and the chilly night was remarkable.

  ‘What a fright you gave me!’ she said. ‘What are you standing out here for?’

  ‘The same as you, I suppose, Miss Armour,’ he said, quietly. ‘It’s gey smoky in there. But we could go round by the stack and sit in the fause-house for a bit. If you have a mind.’

  She looked at him doubtfully by the subdued light of the moon, not yet at the full. When the corn was too green or too wet at harvest time – and when was it ever not too wet, here in Ayrshire? – the stack builder would construct a kind of apartment in the stack, propping it up with timbers, so that the wind could get in and dry the corn out. It was known as the fause-house or false house, and was a great resort of courting couples.

  ‘You needn’t worry. I’d just like to talk to you, Miss Armour. I never seem to get the opportunity to talk to you without a wheen of other lassies, twittering and giggling.’

  It had been a chilly day, and was growing colder by the hour. They could already smell the frost in the air. When she did not object, he took her by the hand, and led her round to the haystack, where they crept into the fause-house ‘like a pair of daft weans’ she said, much inclined to giggle. He seemed determined to be on his best behaviour, although when it was clear that her shawl was inadequate for the wintry night, and she could no longer stop her teeth from chattering, he untied his plaid and wrapped it around both of them. Still like a pair of daft weans and just as
innocent. They spoke mostly about Rab’s father because it had been the anniversary of his death only a week or two ago. Jean knew she had a face and a kindly demeanour that seemed to invite confidences, but she had never imagined Rab Mossgiel confiding in her like this.

  ‘What a terrible winter that was!’ he said. ‘That last winter at Lochlea.’

  There had been constant frosts and greyish yellow mists that made everyone cough uncontrollably. Even Jean, who was as robust as anyone, had found herself waking in the night, struggling to breathe.

  ‘He hadn’t been well for several years. The Tarbolton doctor came to see him, but nothing seemed to help him breathe more easily.’

  ‘Do you miss him?’ she asked. ‘But of course you must miss him.’

  She felt him shift uneasily in the darkness that smelled of smoke from the house, with just a hint of summer, the grassy scent of the stack surrounding them.

  ‘Aye,’ he said at last, with a little sigh. ‘He was a stern man, but I do miss him. I can hardly believe a whole year has gone by.’

  ‘Where was he from?’ she asked. ‘He was not a local man, was he?’

  This had been a subject of much speculation among the belles. And since Rab seemed inclined to talk, she thought she might as well find out as much as she could.