The Physic Garden (20 page)

‘You know exactly what I mean, don’t you? Lassies are sent away when they have a whaup in the nest! Especially when there is no man prepared to marry them. But everyone knows you would marry her tomorrow if you could. So I see no problem that would occasion her being banished.’

I must have blushed scarlet because she looked at me inquisitively, pausing with a fresh half lemon in her hand. She was meant to be dipping it in silver sand, but she put it to her lips and sucked at it momentarily. Then pulled a face, licked her lips, dipped it in sand, and commenced her cleaning again.

‘Could that be the reason? Only you know the answer, William!’

‘No. No. We never … never. There is no possibility.’

‘Are you telling me the truth?’

‘Yes. Of course I am. She’s a good girl. And I never pressed her to more than a kiss or two. I thought it was better to wait.’

I was surprised that my sister knew anything about such matters, but maids will talk to each other I suppose, and I have heard tell that kitchens are very robust places, in big houses at any rate.

She grinned at me. ‘In that case, you have nothing to fear and nothing to worry about. I think her wee sister is just mischief making. I never saw a lass more in love than Jenny Caddas is with you. She has burst into bloom like an apple tree since she has been in your company. She has gone south to fulfil a family obligation and that’s all. Good for her. When she returns you may be that much closer to being able to marry her. In your place, I think I would do as her father says, cherish the thought of her, and wait until he tells you that it is appropriate before writing to her.’

Which was what I did. It was all I could do. But it didn’t prevent me from worrying. And eventually, a couple of weeks later, when the Brown family had returned from Edinburgh but when there was still no word of Jenny, I confided my worries to Thomas, although without going into too many details.

He seemed very surprised and a little perturbed. ‘So that’s what has happened to her!’ he said, frowning. ‘We wondered where she had gone, Marion and I. She left some work all unfinished, you know.’

‘She should not have done that. They should have told you. It would have been a courtesy, surely.’

‘Well, if there was a sudden illness … And besides, we were in Edinburgh at the time.’

‘Her father says she’s in Dumfries, helping to nurse a sick cousin.’

‘For how long?’

‘I don’t know. He can’t say.’

‘It must be something serious. And if so, it’s impossible to predict. Why don’t you write and ask her about it?’

‘He won’t give me the direction.’

‘Why not?’

‘He says it will upset her and make her homesick.’

He pursed his lips. ‘I suppose that’s possible.’

‘He says that when she comes home again, he’ll start to think about her tocher and that we should be wed.’

‘He said that to you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you agreed?’

‘I would marry her tomorrow if I could.’

‘Then you’ve nothing to worry about, William.’

‘I’m worried because she left without saying goodbye. And her sister told me that she was crying and she didn’t want to go.’

‘But she was leaving you. And she didn’t know for how long. And she was being hurried away without being able to say a proper goodbye to you!’

‘You’re right. I know. But it worries me all the same. And to be frank with you, I miss her.’

‘Well, we miss her too,’ he said, thoughtfully. ‘Very much. We miss seeing her sitting in the library, perched on the window seat with the sun in her hair. We miss the way she would sometimes sing when she was sewing. I loved to hear her sing. She had the sweetest, clearest voice I have ever heard, and that includes all the fashionable young ladies who think that they have a voice because they have learned to string a few conventional notes together. Oh those interminable musical evenings, William. You should thank the Lord that you never have to attend them!’

It was another thing I had never noticed, not consciously. But it was true. She would sing as she stitched, love songs mostly but sometimes lullabies.

‘She could sing “Waly Waly” till it brought a tear to your eye,’ he added, and then, much to my embarrassment, he started to sing the old song of love and loss himself:

I had never yet heard Thomas sing, but his voice was deep and clear and he could carry a tune. I can hear it yet: those bleak words and that eerie melody which seemed to bring a breath of sadness into the room, a sadness which lingered long after the notes of his song had died away.

Radical. Of the root. There is some correspondence, surely, between the radical movement and the work of the gardener. Is it that he sees how all things grow in their proper time? How all things have equal value but different properties. A garden, to be truly a garden worth cultivating, needs due measure of different plants: flowers, vegetables, soft fruits, trees and shrubs, large and small. I was reading, not only about gardening and plants and their properties, but there were other books in Thomas’s library, books about the rights of man; works that changed not just my knowledge but my thinking as well. He had a handsomely illustrated volume of the poems and letters of Robert Burns and it was obvious where the poet’s sympathies lay, although he had been but a cautious exponent of radicalism. Like most of us, he had a wife and family to support, the fear of poverty ate into him, and he also knew a bit about patronage. So many of us are caught between the knowledge that lies deep in head and heart and the pressing demands of our everyday lives.

All of this stood me in good stead later on, when I left gardening forever and entered into the world of books and bookselling. Where did I get the wherewithal for such an undertaking you may wonder? Well, I got it from my father-in-law. Always of radical tendencies, he wholeheartedly embraced the movement with
renewed vigour. I run ahead of myself, perhaps because of a very reasonable desire to leap over the events of the following few months, a desire not to come to the point. But I have to return to the tale, and it must be told just as it happened.

From Jenny there was complete silence for some weeks. I worked away in the gardens, a little sadly to be sure, because I was aware that the future care of all my beloved trees and plants would fall to somebody else. But I was making plans with Thomas, plans that involved moving myself and at least some of my family to Ayrshire. And there was a certain excitement in that, or would have been, if I had been able to take my mind off Jenny for more than a few hours at a time. I would visit her father and he would give me word of her, a carefully balanced tissue of caution and hope. He was sure that she would soon be coming home but he couldn’t say when.

At last, I demanded that he give me the direction to her cousin’s house in Dumfries. And because he could see that I was on the verge of losing all patience with him, he agreed.

I can see him yet, sitting at his table, with his head bent, writing it down for me.

‘Write to her,’ he said. ‘She is but a poor correspondent where I am concerned, but she may write to you. Tell her that we miss her. We’d be glad to have her home again. Tell her that she should come home again as soon as she can.’

After that, I sent her letters whenever I could, writing them in Thomas’s library, using Thomas’s paper and his pens. At long last she replied, but her letters were few and far between and disappointingly short, a few lines in her neat, childish hand, telling me that pen and paper were at a premium in the house, as were candles to see by, so she would not be writing very often. She was well, although her cousin was still very ill. Dumfries was a pretty town, but she wished that she were at home. She would never fail to ask after my family, her father and Anna. When I can bear to reread them – for I have them yet, buried deep inside my desk, thrust to the back of the secret drawer concealed by a lion’s head
carving – I can see that they told me almost nothing except that she herself was well. But not happy. She never mentioned that she was happy and I sensed that below her reassuring words, something was very much amiss.

In October I decided that enough was enough. We were in the mild spell that often comes to the west before the onset of winter, much like now, as I write these words, before the rains begin in good earnest. There was yellow stubble in the fields, the leaves were turning to liquid gold and there was a breathless quality over the land as though it were pausing before winter, sighing for summer, but with a wee spice of anticipation for the coming spring about it all the same. So do all green and growing things fall in with the seasons. Sometimes it seems to me that it is only we human beings who battle against what should be our deepest instincts.

But there, I have become ridiculously philosophical in my old age and I am quite sure that I thought of none of this back then, when I was a daft young man, and wanted only to see Jenny home again so that we could make plans for our wedding. All I thought was that we were in for a spell of fine weather, perhaps the last before winter, and I must seize the initiative and find out what was detaining my girl in Dumfries, before travelling became thoroughly impractical. Faculty would not be pleased at my absence, but then there was little they could do to me since they had already dismissed me. James knew fine what he had to do in the gardens and urged me to go and leave everything in his hands, which were capable enough.

And so I took myself off to Dumfries. From Thomas, I borrowed a horse called Meg, like Tam O’ Shanter’s mare, the one that lost her
ain grey tail
to Cutty Sark. I sent James to make the request lest Thomas should question me too closely about my journey. Having made the decision to visit Jenny, at last, I think I
was afraid my friend might try to dissuade me from travelling. He lent me Meg very gladly, although I was but a poor horseman, and bounced up and down upon the placid animal, giving myself the most amazing pains in my back and thighs. Every so often, Meg would turn her head and look round at me with an expression of dismayed disbelief on her features, if a horse can possibly do such a thing. It was comical in the extreme and greatly endeared the animal to me. The journey, even along the postroad, was arduous, and I marvelled that Jenny had undertaken it, although she had been in a coach, which would have been easier. But then I had to take stabling for Meg at coaching inns each night – the horse was better accommodated than I was – and I found myself sleeping in the least expensive and therefore most bug- and
flea-infested
bedrooms, on filthy straw. There was little I could do to prevent the loathsome creatures feasting off me, but I closed my eyes to the discomfort and thought of Jenny. When I was outside the town of Dumfries, I stopped, stripped off my soiled linen, washed in a fast-flowing and icy burn and changed into a more respectable shirt which I had kept clean for the purpose, so that her relatives would not wonder what manner of vagabond was coming to their door.

I stabled my Meg at another inn. I think we had been something of a trial to each other, but she seemed to have grown fond of me, surveying me with weary patience when I came to saddle her up each morning. Still, I’m sure she was glad enough to be rid of me for a spell, finding herself warm and well fed in a good stable. Then I wandered about aimlessly, clutching the paper upon which Sandy had written his direction. I could not make out the maze of unfamiliar streets at all but, at last, I found a ragged boy with a grubby face, crouching on a street corner, tossing pebbles in the air and trying to catch them again. By dint of promising to give him a penny for his pains, I had a guide to the very doorstep.

It was a tumbledown stone cottage with a mouldy thatch, like a worn-out wig, in a back close of the town, and I would never have come upon it without the child’s assistance. A thin line of
smoke, a pencil stroke across the sky, went up from the chimney. The little lad grinned at me and tested the coin between his teeth – God knows what he was testing it for but I suppose he thought that it made him look like a grown man – and then swaggered off.

‘Mind the auld yin!’ was all he said, glancing over his shoulder. ‘She’ll gie you a sair dunt on the heid as soon as look at ye!’

With this awful warning ringing in my ears, I knocked on the door. What ‘auld yin’ I asked myself? But then, I knew Jenny had been helping to look after a sick old lady. I had timed my visit for a very respectable hour of the early afternoon. I thought I would be able to talk to Jenny, perhaps even walk out with her for a while, spend a night at the inn where I had stabled the mare, or even at their house, if her relatives allowed, and then return to Glasgow, with the benefit of having reassured myself that all was well with her and that all was well between the two of us.

I don’t know quite what I expected but it certainly wasn’t what I found. My worries were all centred upon the thought that Jenny might have changed towards me; that she might have met some other lad, down in Dumfries – a wealthy weaver perhaps, or a prosperous young farmer – and have changed her mind about our betrothal. What I didn’t anticipate at all was the skivvy with coal dust and sores on her face who answered my knock and ushered me into the front room. It was a parlour kitchen where a woman, who contrived to be both plump and hard-faced at the same time, looked upon me with profound suspicion. I would have put her at something over forty and it struck me that she must have been the wee lad’s ‘auld yin’.

She wore a black wool dress that was stained and draggled, and she had a yellowed mutch covering a head of greasy, greying hair. She was sitting sewing. It looked like another rusty black skirt that she was mending, crudely darning with long stitches in black wool, and she had a bowl of some kind of gruel beside her and a cup of ale. There was a fire that seemed to give out no heat whatsoever, smouldering faintly in the hearth. It struck me that the thin line of smoke I had seen from outside, rising through the air, must have come from this inadequate fire. Although the day was not cold it seemed a peculiarly cheerless room, and the woman seemed an equally cheerless individual. My heart sank.

‘Mr William Lang,’ said the skivvy, poking her head round the door and then withdrawing it precipitately, as though afraid of receiving blows just for the indiscretion of announcing me to her mistress. She motioned me into the room and trotted off as fast as her spindly legs would carry her.

The woman looked me up and down and went on with her stitching.

‘Aye?’ she said. ‘What are you wanting, lad? There’s nae work here. And I don’t give charity to beggars.’

‘I am no beggar,’ I replied, trying to maintain my dignity. ‘And I have no need of work, or even lodging. But I am come on business of my own. I am looking for Jenny Caddas.’

‘Oh you are, are you?’

I cannot rightly describe to you the expression that crossed her face at the mention of Jenny’s name. It was some unfathomable mixture of cunning, caution, shame and, yes, distaste. I know that it made my insides clench with some nameless fear, a premonition of disaster. And regret too. I should have come sooner, I thought. I should not have trusted her father. I should have come sooner. It is too late. But too late for what, I could not rightly have told you.

‘She and I are to be betrothed with the blessing of her father,’ I continued. ‘But she has been gone from home for so long now, albeit the reasons were all of a charitable nature. And we are worried about her!’

‘Oh, you are, are you?’ she repeated, gazing at me, her thin lips twisted into a sneer.

‘I will be starting a new position in Ayrshire after Candlemas, and thought that I should seize my only opportunity to come and visit her, so I would thank you to tell her that I am here, as I am sure she will be very pleased to see me.’

‘Aye. I am sure that would be the case,’ she said, slowly, putting down her sewing and squinting up at me in the gloom. ‘So, tell me. You’ll be the gardener’s son from Glasgow. Is that it?’

‘Yes. I am. And a gardener in my own right, not just the gardener’s son.’

‘Aye, aye, Mr High and Mighty. And you want to marry the lass?’

‘I’ve told you. We have her father’s blessing. We hope to marry as soon as I am set up and have a decent home to bring her to. I have been promised a cottage in my new position.’

I don’t know why I felt the need to justify myself to her. I owed her nothing. But I think I had some idea of placating her, or at least making things easier for Jenny.

She stared into the fire and I could have sworn then that a momentary pity crossed her face. It was extraordinary how transparent her features were. She was an ugly enough woman and yet she could not dissemble. Her feelings were clearly visible on her face for all to see.

There was a silence in the room, which I again felt prompted to fill with explanations, in case I had not made myself clear enough. ‘Her father told me that she was called here to help nurse a sick cousin. I have been writing to her, and she has been writing to me.’

She gazed up at me then.

‘And when did you last have a letter from her, son?’

‘Some time ago. I have been on the road for several days. But it must have been a couple of weeks before that. A note just, telling me that she was well and looking forward to seeing me on her return. But she did not say when that return might be and, in consultation with some of my friends and hers, I decided that I would come and satisfy myself as to her wellbeing.’

‘Friends, eh?’ she said.

‘Yes. She has influential friends, and so do I!’

Even to myself, my voice sounded ridiculously formal to the point of pompousness.

‘And here you are.’

‘Here I am. And – begging your pardon, madam, if I offend you – but it is high time she was at home with her family again.’

She hauled herself to her feet, setting down her sewing, the rusty black skirt, on a small table by her side. She smelled of
smoke and camphor and stale sweat. She went over to a jug and poured me a cup of ale. I had expected it to be thin and sour but to my surprise, I found it was very good.

‘The trouble is,’ she said, and then hesitated. ‘The trouble is that she isnae here.’

Again I felt it, that terrible sinking in heart and stomach. ‘What do you mean, she isn’t here? Has she gone home then?’

Had our paths crossed? Had she finally been allowed to return to her father? I had deliberately not told him what I was planning on doing, so he would have had no opportunity to deter me from coming. But perhaps she had already been on her way home, even as Meg and I were plodding our weary way to Dumfries. As I thought about this, another, more sensible part of my mind realised that I was clutching at straws. She had not returned to her father’s house. If she had been on her way home, she would have written to me to tell me so. She would have been so pleased to be free at last, that she would have let me know well in advance.

I drank my ale, for I was very thirsty, and stared at the woman. We exchanged names and, with curious formality, we shook hands. Her name was Mary Strachan. She was some relative of Jenny’s mother, a cousin of some sort. I never did establish the proper relationship, whether first or second cousin, but it didn’t matter. I saw it again, that strange, shifty look cross her face. And then she said, ‘Well she’s no’ here, son. That’s all I can say for sure. She’s no’ here.’

‘But she was here?’

‘Aye. She was here. But she’s no’ here the noo.’

‘So, where is she?’

She shrugged, shook her head. ‘How should I ken? The lassie upped and left in the middle of the night and that’s a’ I ken aboot it. Never tell’t a soul where she was going or why.’

‘But she
must
have. She must have left a note of some sort. How could she just leave, all unprotected? In the night! Where would she go? She must have told somebody.’

‘Well she didnae. She was neither use nor ornament while she
was here and noo she’s gane. And that’s the lang and the short of it. So ye can away back to your gairdens and tell her faither that I did all I could do, but nae mair.’

She picked up her sewing, turned her face to the fire, which continued to give off a little light but small heat, and commenced her stitching again, jagged stitches of black wool like her own broken teeth. Not a word more would she say to me, but when I stood rooted to the spot, she presently rang the bell and the skivvy edged into the room, keeping her back to the wall.

‘Show the young gentleman oot, Rebecca,’ she said. And that was all she said. Short of physical violence, which believe me, I contemplated, I could not have made her tell me more.

What would you have done? What would I have done now? Well, as an older man with a certain gravitas about me, I think I would perhaps have managed to coax the truth out of her. As a young man with no gravitas whatsoever, there was nothing for me to do except leave the house and make my way back to the nearby inn, with a view to hastening back to Glasgow with all speed. Perhaps Jenny would be there before me.

It was while I was half-heartedly eating a stew whose chief ingredients seemed to be ragged and unidentifiable vegetables mingled with suspicious pieces of gristle which put me much in mind of elderly horses like Meg, that I saw the skivvy, Rebecca, loitering about the doorway.

‘The mistress fell asleep in front of the fire, and I slipped out for a minute, but she’ll skin me alive if she finds out I’ve been talking to you.’

‘Then tell me quickly. Tell me what you’ve come to say.’

‘Only that they were far from kind to the puir lassie. That woman and her worthless husband, deil tak’ them for a pair of greedy beggars. There was little I could dae. But they had her sewin’ away for all she was worth, night and day. The mistress
would tak’ the things away and sell them, but never a penny did she gie to your lassie. She said it was to pay for her bed and board. And they had her daein the washing an’ all an’ feedin’ the chickens they keep oot the back. She was mair o’ a skivvy than I am, if you ask me, for a’ that she was faim’ly to them.’

I sat amazed, my spoon clutched in my hand like a dagger.

‘But what about her cousin, the lady that was so ill? She was sent to help with the nursing, surely?’

The lassie looked at me with scornful pity. ‘Whit cousin?’ she said. ‘Whit lady? There’s nae ladies in that hoose, except maybe for your puir lassie. And what nursin’ are you talking about? There’s naebody sick in that hoose. Ah weel, sick in the heid mebbe.’

‘I don’t understand you.’

‘I speak as I find. It was cruel to have a lassie in that state workin’ day and night, and nae wunner she went aff. I’m tellin’ you, if I’d had mair courage, I’d have been aff tae. I’d have gane wi’ her. She said, “Will ye come with me, Becky?” but I didnae have the courage. So she went all by herself, God love her. It was about a week ago. She left in the middle of the night, taking her bundle wi’ her, and a wee bit breid and cheese that I had saved for her, and a few bawbees that she took from the jar in the kitchen to buy mair breid on the road. And that was the last ony of us saw of her.’

I felt my heart contract in my chest.

‘But where did she go?’ I asked. ‘Did she tell you where she was going?’

‘Are ye daft?’ she said.

‘In God’s name, for what reason would she set off all alone? Why?’

‘Ach,’ she said, as if I were a simpleton, which indeed I think I was. ‘Only just to seek the faither of the wean. Whit other reason could there be?’