The Jewel Read online

  ‘You’re right about that.’

  ‘But if she goes to Gavin Hamilton’s house - would they be discreet?’ asked Jean. This had happened so suddenly that she had only just begun to add it all up in her head, only just realised the full implications of it.

  ‘Oh aye, Gavin can be more than discreet and his wife will do as she’s told. They’re badly in need of a nursemaid, a wet nurse if possible, a good, clean lassie. And if Hamilton arranges it with Montgomerie, there will be no more questions asked, I can tell you that.’

  ‘But there’ll be gossip.’

  ‘There’s aye gossip, Jeany. I expect they’re doing it right now, about you and me.’

  ‘I expect they are.’

  That night, she was very late home. It was dark by the time she stepped through the door, having first stopped by Catherine Govan’s house, to pick up a piece of half finished needlework as proof that Jean had been industrious. Truth to tell, Catherine had generously done most of it for her, so that she would have something to show for her time.

  ‘In for a penny, in for a pound,’ was all she had said about the deception.

  Jean’s mother wondered that she had lingered so long at Catherine Govan’s house and she prattled blithely on about this or that stitch and told tales about Willie who had been helping with the hay at Mossgiel and had been more of a hindrance than a help according to Catherine. But even this harmless mention of Mossgiel was wormwood to Mary Armour and she frowned, hoping that they didn’t waste too much of their precious time gossiping about the Burns family, and what did Catherine Govan’s brother think he was doing, sending his son to work for that good for nothing Rab Mossgiel anyway?

  Chapter Nine

  The Rocks at Ballochmyle

  The Catrine woods were yellow seen,

  The flowers decay’d on Catrine lea,

  Nae lav’rock sang on hillock green,

  But nature sicken’d on the e’e.

  A few days later, May Campbell left Coilsfield to take up the position of nursemaid to Gavin Hamilton’s baby son, Alexander. Only a few of those most closely involved knew that she was not just a nursemaid, but a wet nurse, and those household servants who had to know were well warned, on pain of dismissal, to keep the matter strictly secret. There was no guarantee of privacy in a place like Mauchline, but Hamilton and his wife were well liked, and the immediate household respected his wishes, realising that the good name of a young woman who had done nobody any harm was at stake. It was well known that Hamilton’s wife was finding the new baby something of a trial and that an extra pair of hands in the nursery would be no bad thing, so few people from the wider population thought to enquire further. Besides, May Campbell had been nursemaid to a minister on the Isle of Arran before coming to Coilsfield. What more natural, then, than that she should be sent from Coilsfield to help out with Hamilton’s youngest? If Rab Mossgiel had a hand in the matter, it was never common knowledge, and Jean said nothing to anybody about it.

  All the same, the girl’s presence in the town made Jean uneasy. Much of the time she was hidden away in the nursery with the baby, but the house was in the very centre of Mauchline, and May was made so comfortable there that she blossomed. Jean, living close by, couldn’t help but see her from time to time. She found the improvement in the girl’s appearance faintly disturbing too: the bloom on her cheek was obvious. They were looking after her well in that household, even though Jean fancied it was more out of consideration for the baby than out of any great care for May Campbell. But the girl was obliging, good natured and pleasing. Her breasts were still swollen, but her figure was shapely, her fair hair thick and shining. It was her best feature, giving her rather bland face a distinction it would never have possessed without it. She lacked animation, thought Jean. There was a sweet vacuousness about her that men seemed to love. She would always be biddable, would always do as she was told, would try very hard not to give anyone trouble on her account, apologising for things that were not even her fault. What was there to dislike in this? Rab had said. She was a nice lassie.

  As for Rab and Jean, with the problem of May Campbell solved for the time being, they grew more reckless with the turning year. In August, whenever they could arrange a meeting, they would wander through the woods at the back of Netherplace, or along the banks of the river at Coilsfield. The ditches were full of foxgloves, well past their best now, and creamy meadowsweet turning brown. By September, the leaves on the trees were just on the turn. Soon they’d be the colour of Rab’s plaid, although it had suffered by being used as a blanket. Towards the end of the month, the apples in the orchards at Netherplace and Coilsfield were ripening, and even in the cottage gardens they would pass (and sometimes steal from) an old and hoary apple tree here and there: crisp, creamy Oslins mostly and Cambusnethan Pippins. There were other apple varieties that neither of them could name, for they were not gardeners, although Rab said his father would have known. There were also brambles aplenty, glossy and sweet, there for the taking in all the hedgerows, if you could brave their thorny stalks and the wasps that fed off them. He would pick them as they went and feed them to her. The sensation of his fingers against her lips, the scent and the sweetness of the berries, always made a tremor of desire pass through her body.

  Sometimes, daringly, she would set off berrying in the daytime, taking advantage of the occasional golden afternoon when the harvest was all done, carrying a battered copper pan and heading out along the road to Mossgiel. He would slip away from the farm and meet her somewhere along the way, and they would fill the pan with luscious berries so that she would have something to take home to her mother. But from time to time, one or other of her sisters would tag along too, and then she would have to pass him by on the road, his dog lolloping at his heels, and pretend that the meeting was quite by chance, and pass the time of day with him as formally as she could. He would call her ‘Miss Armour’ and she would call him ‘Mr Burns’, with her sisters blushing and scolding her afterwards for talking to ‘that man’, well aware of his reputation for wickedness.

  A few times they walked a little way down the road towards Auchinleck, towards Ballochmyle, avoiding prying eyes, listening for hoofbeats in the distance, always ready to take to the woods and fields on either side. They were still keeping their love secret, still hoping for a change in James and Mary Armour’s feelings about Rab. One evening, they found themselves by the old Campbell tower of Kingencleuch, near the Lily Glen, where there was a trickle of a burn that joined with the River Ayr further down. It would be a pretty spot in springtime, full of flowers: woodruff, creeping jenny and bluebells, although now there were yellow tints of autumn everywhere. Rab seemed to have an unerring instinct for these places, and she thought he must have spent many hours roaming these woods and fields. It would be good to come back here next year, in May perhaps, when the whole place would be drenched in sweet scent and the purple flowers called baldeirie that were supposed to kindle love would be in vivid bloom. But perhaps love had been kindled already. There were steps cut into the rock down the side of the burn and a pool for bathing.

  ‘I come here when it’s warm and I’m weary,’ he remarked. ‘It’s a very good place for bathing.’

  She thought of him naked, sliding into the water, the whiteness of his body contrasted with the brown of his hands and his wiry forearms and his face, all of him that ever saw the sunshine.

  He told her stories about the old tower of Kingencleuch, but chiefly how Mona was the daughter of the man who owned the place, a fearsome hunter called Cormac. The girl had fallen in love against her father’s wishes with Percy Seton of Mauchline Castle. Cormac had forced his head huntsman to confront a wild boar in the woods above the River Ayr, and the man was gored to death, whereupon superstitious Cormac believed that the dead huntsman was haunting the vaults of his castle, seeking revenge. Percy took advantage of Cormac’s credulity when, on the day of Mona’s wedding to a man sh
e despised, he had emerged, all covered in mud and sheep’s blood, from the tunnel below the castle. His appearance had inspired terror in Cormac and his guests, terror in all of them except the bride. She had been warned in advance and was ready to leave, whereupon Percy carried her off to his own castle in Mauchline and married her there without further ado.

  Rab’s storytelling invariably made her laugh because he couldn’t be serious for long, not at that time and not with her.

  ‘Let that be a lesson to your father, Jeany!’ he said. ‘Let that be a grim warning. Who knows but there may be a tunnel running from Mossgiel to the Cowgate and that I might not emerge from it on some dark winter’s evening and carry you off and marry you!’

  The notion of marrying him both excited and alarmed her. He had mentioned once before that he was in want of a wife but not since. Was that the way his thoughts were going again? Was he so serious? Well, perhaps he was. If their regular meetings did not constitute courting, what did? And if they had done little more than kiss and cuddle and touch each other, lying together and working each other up into a fine lather of feelings, it was still something that both her parents and the kirk would see as reason enough for marriage, even though they might not like the idea very much.

  In the woods to the east of the haunted tower they came across a mighty rock, a series of massive vertical boulders of red sandstone, laid on end, and carved all over with strange marks: rings and stars, squares and spirals and depressions in the stone.

  ‘What is it? Who made these marks?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve been here before and I aye find myself wondering, but I’ve no idea. We’re not the first to be here, though, Jeany. Look – somebody has carved the year 1751 up there.’

  ‘So they have. But why would they make all these signs on the rock?’

  ‘I think these are much older. Long, long ago, before Mauchline was even a town.’

  ‘Do you think so? Do you think elves made them, Rab?’

  When they were ploughing, the men would turn up all kinds of strange things, not least the beautifully carved heads of what looked like wee toty arrows, and they would call them ‘elf shot’, thinking that the sites marked some long ago battle among the fairy folk who had lived here long before men walked the land.

  ‘I don’t know about elves. My mother would think so. But then she believes in all kinds of ghosts and goblins and other strange folk. It is a sair trial to her, Jeany, for she’s aye on the lookout for ill omens. But this looks like a map, or a plan of something, made in stone, and I don’t think elves had need of such things. But nobody seems to ken what it is. I’ve asked folk and there are few who even know of its existence. Your father might know something. He’s a stonemason after all. And he’s built bridges round here.’

  ‘That’s true, he has.’

  ‘But I darenae be the one to ask him, and you’d better not tell him you’ve seen it, or he’ll wonder what you’re doing wandering the braes of Ballochmyle and who you’ve been here with!’

  ‘He’s never once spoken of it.’

  ‘You see more of it in the winter. The bushes hide it well in the summertime. Now that the leaves are falling and the grasses are dying, you can get a sight of it from further away. But nobody walks here, and they believe the old tower is haunted by the dead huntsman, so they stay away from it.’

  She traced the shapes with her fingers, intrigued and puzzled by them. She had never seen anything like this before. ‘Do you think it is a map of some sort?’

  ‘I’ve seen such stones laid flat to the ground in one or two other places. But never in such quantity as this. Just the odd ring or spiral. Back when I was a lad, there was an old cousin of my mother’s living with us. She told such tales! She said folk would pour milk into them as an offering to the fairies. But that’s on big flagstones out on the moors. This is different.’

  ‘I didn’t even know it was here, Rab.’

  ‘Few do. There’s a kind of superstitious fear of the place in many folk. And look,’ he pointed at one of the carvings. ‘What about this? What do you think this might be? Do you not think it looks like a deer or a doe?’

  ‘Aye, it does. Very like.’

  ‘There are three of them. Maybe some man went hunting in these woods and carved these images as a kind of magic to call the creatures to him. Maybe I should carve an image of you, Jeany.’

  She shivered. She wasn’t sure she liked it. It didn’t sound like something a good Christian body should be doing, gazing at a heathen thing in an unchancy, pagan place like this. There was a fey feeling to it, a puzzle to which they had no key.

  She said, ‘It’s like writing that we cannae read.’

  He ran his fingers over the carvings: spirals, cups, rings, whorls, squares, and stars. What could they all mean?

  ‘It is so, Jeany. Just like writing. The feint a body can read it now. We’ve forgotten, if we ever had the skill, and the folk who made these marks, even if they were men and women just like us, they have left us no key to understanding any of it.’

  ‘It’s uncanny.’

  ‘It might simply be a book in stone. A poem. A song if only we had the wit to understand it.’

  She remembered the monstrous red stone with its strange symbols later that year when Rab’s young brother John, who had been ailing for some time, died at Mossgiel. He died in late October, when the autumn storms were howling in from the west, and she found herself wondering if their visit to the stone had been unlucky, if the very fact that Rab had traced the heathen symbols with his fingers, back and forth, round and round, had somehow cursed him. But then she thought how foolish, what on earth would the minister say if she were to admit to such feelings, and wasn’t it a daft thought that such ancient magic could have any power at all over a farmer like Rab and the daughter of a stonemason like herself?

  Rab was sad and sorry about John. He was always sad and sorry about the onset of winter too. He told her that he liked the winter in some ways, liked to see the bare bones of the trees, and the bleakness of the landscape, but it was not his best time and it made him gloomy, fatigued beyond measure. And now they had lost John. It was always the way of it when somebody had been ill like that, every day a little worse. It was as though you got most of your grieving done first, before the inevitable end, so that when the sick individual died, there was a terrible sadness for sure, but a faint feeling of relief about it all the same. And a sense of guilt that you were relieved. It had happened often enough in Jean’s family for her to know the feeling too and sympathise. And then there was the empty space in your life, one that you sought to fill with something else.

  He had so often said to her in those last few months, when John had been failing more each day, ‘I must get back for Johnnie,’ or ‘Johnnie’s no weel and my mammy’s that worried about him, but I’ll take him some brambles or some blaeberries or some fresh hazelnuts. Perhaps they’ll cheer him up.’ All of these things he had said at one time or another, and now there was nobody to take anything to, and she could see that it pained him. She hated for him to feel hurt, wanted more than anything to comfort him.

  They grew closer, more affectionate than ever, and at the same time more comfortable in each other’s company, in each other’s arms. For weeks now they had been kissing and cuddling and more than that, until she was breathless at the very thought of him. She could not help but remember Betty Paton. He had fathered the wean, had been content to take his punishment by being singled out in the kirk on three successive Sundays, pay the fine for the benefit of the poor of the parish, and be declared a bachelor again. He had acknowledged the child and agreed to support her while there was breath in his body, but he had never promised Betty marriage and he never would. What would he do if she, Jean, gave herself to him and found herself in the same situation?

  Increasingly, she was fearful of their meetings, of what might ensue. Somet
imes it came to her – when she lay wakeful and worried in the early hours of the morning – that she should just do as she was told, make her mother and father happy, and consent to a betrothal with Rab Wilson the weaver. But he had gone to Paisley, and out of sight was very much out of mind. When she met with Rab Mossgiel, she was swept up in it all again, her heart racing, her mind clouded, and he would groan and say that she was a cruel, wanton lass, but he would be guided by her. Perhaps if he had been brutal rather than persuasive, if it had all happened too soon, too quickly, she would not have found herself loving him so dearly. But he waited and waited, until Jean herself could hardly bear to wait any longer. She was dizzy with desire for him, and those hours spent lying with him on a bed of moss, breast to breast, were exciting beyond measure. Illicit. Forbidden. Inadvisable. She knew all too well that they were rushing headlong towards something irrevocable. For sheer, wanton joy, for the sense of abandonment to and in another human being, nothing would ever match those first few months of her love for Rab Mossgiel.

  Chapter Ten

  The Room at Johnnie Dow’s

  But warily tent when ye come to court me,

  And come nae unless the back-yett be a-jee;

  Syne up the back-stile, and let naebody see,

  And come as ye were na comin’ to me.

  In November of that same year, at Martinmas, May Campbell left Gavin Hamilton’s house and went back to Coilsfield, back to working in the dairy there for a little while at least. The story in the town was that the baby was old enough not to need his nursemaid, while May was needed at Coilsfield. Hamilton had engaged an older and more experienced woman as nurse for the children. Jean was sceptical. She knew little about dairying at that time, but she was well aware from conversations with Rab that the cold months were not the best for cheese making. After all, Gilbert and the rest of the family were excellent cheese makers. Although Coilsfield had a bigger herd and probably better fed and more productive cows, the dairy could probably have done well enough without May Campbell for the winter months. But the truth was that Alexander Hamilton was weaned, and May was no longer needed. Martinmas was as good a time as any for the change to be made.