by Peg Kingman
“Oh, Dad! You know very well to call me Mary. ‘Polly’ is a nickname fit only for babies.”
“I beg your pardon, my dear Mary. It was only the force of ancient habit. But what do you make of a velvet-hilted sword?”
“Might it have been a French sword?” she proposed. “Brought with him from France?”
“I daresay it might well have been, and no Highland claymore. Now, this plain grey stuff is supposed to have been from the dress he wore when disguised as ‘Betty Burke,’ and the string is from the apron worn over it. The tartan and the red worsted are from the suit of clothes given him when he left off being ‘Betty Burke’ and became a man again. The splinter of oak is a memento of the boat that carried him over the sea—from Borodale, after the catastrophe at Culloden. And the leather is from his shoe, or so Bishop Forbes assures us. Authentic Vestiges—of the Natural History of Prince Charles Edward Stuart. Nina, did you get all that?”
Nina, whose handwriting was deemed the most elegant, was writing little pasteboard cards to explain these relics laid out upon the library table among various other books and curiosities, for the entertainment of the guests expected today, the Prestonpans Gala Day; or—as the family had taken to calling it—Our Day o’Treason. “To spare us the necessity of explaining, all day long,” said Mr Chambers. “How tedious it is to furnish endless explanations!”
Of course no one was a Jacobite in any serious way, these days; but anyone less earnest than Lady Janet (who had absented herself from the occasion) was glad to come and pretend; glad of an afternoon’s sentiment and excitement. A pleasant jaunt down from town; an easy stroll to the old battlefield; plaids and blue bonnets to be worn; pipe music (in merciful moderation); a banquet at long tables under the trees, with toasts to be drunk; perhaps some breathless reels to be danced by the young people; all to be concluded by a bonfire after dark, and fireworks. Some seventy or eighty friends were expected.
At the ordained time they began arriving, in their droves.
The conservatory door leading out to the garden was braced open, and tides of guests drifted happily inward and outward, back and forth, all afternoon. Two floors above this doorway was Constantia’s little room, and from her chair at her open window she could hear perfectly the lively chat and laughter which gusted upward. From behind the scrim of the voile undercurtain, she could see, too, without being seen.
When the time had come to progress to the historic Prestonpans battlefield—a mile to eastward—quite a number of guests declined to accompany Mrs Chambers, preferring instead to loaf about the ground-floor reception rooms and the gardens with Mr Chambers, eating bowlsful of strawberries and drinking punch. It was by greatest good luck a fine warm day, and just now there was a party gamboling up the walk from the doocot at the bottom of the garden. Constantia could hear men’s voices; women’s voices; children’s high voices; laughter; railliery. The pigeons, disturbed by the unaccustomed commotion, had taken to the air, and were wheeling about. Livia, at her breast, was nearly asleep. Charlie, already sated, slept in his cradle across the room.
There floated up to her a man’s voice, declaiming: “Certain things have actually happened. These events are facts. Other things have not happened. They might have happened; for there is nothing in natural law to have prevented their happening. However, they did not happen. The things that actually happened, in their actual sequence, are History. That is what History is made of: a series, a mere series of occurrences; of events. ‘W-A-H,’ I call it: What Actually Happened. Much of History is deeply obscure; it is no easy task to ascertain What Actually Happened—and what did not. And in what sequence. The difficulty, however, of ascertaining What Actually Happened is no excuse for pretending that it does not matter; or that we cannot know; or that our guesses are as good as knowledge. It is no excuse for failing to distinguish between what, in fact, did and did not happen. For failing to make the attempt, at least.” His loud braying voice—who was he?—became inaudible as he passed into the house. It was very annoying, that voice; and therefore annoying that his words should nonetheless strike Constantia as important.
“This actually happened.” In her memory she could hear Hugh’s voice saying those words. At Neuilly on a gusty autumn day, at a wide bend of the glistening river. Halfway down the river bank was a limestone outcropping, a ledge. Hugh, his coat thrown aside, was kneeling over his task, bent and intent. Deftly he applied an engraver’s tool, a burin; then a small dry brush; then he bent closer still, to blow away the dust he had made; spending his breath upon the object he was uncovering, discovering, freeing from the matrix of limestone in which it had been encased for so long, unimaginably long. His shirt-sleeves were rolled up, so that the play of sinew and muscle showed in his forearms, where the hairs sprang lively, ardently, from his golden dust-covered skin; but what a clean floury dust it made, this pale limestone! How miraculous, the wrists! Look, how they rotated! She had had to look away from the length of his back, from the long ridge of muscle to each side of the spine under his linen shirt. How well made he was: neck, arms, shoulders, and chest, muscled by years of working stone; years of lifting, splitting, drilling, channeling, mauling, bullying, coaxing stone, ever since he was grown big enough to swing a sledgehammer. Just then it was grains of dust that he dislodged, not blocks of stone. “Ah! Come up, now; come up, hinney!” he murmured; and it came free: a Potamides (or perhaps it was a Tympanotonos?) once alive, now turned to stone. He had rubbed it against his shirt. Spat on it, and rubbed it again; held it up to blue sky. Taking her hand, he had turned it over; placed the shell on the center of her palm, saying, “This actually happened. It lived; it died; a hundred millions of years before us. Here is the proof. And look, it is still here.”
At that moment Constantia had fallen in love with Hugh. That is a fact; it actually happened.
She now reached into the pocket she wore beneath her skirt to feel the elongated prickly shell of the little fossil snail. It was still here. Where else would it be? She did not need to bring it out, or see it; the mere feel of its familiar ridges was enough.
But she had nothing at all of her unchristened son. No lock of his hair—he’d had no hair. What could she have kept? She wished she had thought to take a paring from his fingernail, a transparent little crescent of himself. What remained of him? His lifeless small body had been wrapped in linen; placed in a small casket; committed to the churchyard, while her childhood friend Jeebon Sing—Dr John Sing—who was a piper, had played a lament for him. Her nameless son was still there, in the churchyard; where else would he be? But he had been here. Had lived; had died. He was a fact.
But why have certain things happened? And other—equally possible—things not happened?
There came a tap at her door. “May we come in, Mrs MacAdam? It’s Mrs MacDonald,” said the familiar voice of her friend, at the door. “And I’ve brought you a very special visitor, a dear old friend of yours; you’ll never guess who is come to see you!”
How she had aged, this visitor, this dear but least-expected of old friends! “Why, it’s Mrs Fleming!” said Constantia. “How astonished I am! How glad to see you! And here, of all places!” The hair, formerly flame-red, was now nearly white—but the bright eyes still smiled from the same face; the affectionate smile was the same; the slim grace of her as she bent to kiss Constantia was the same.
“By merest good fortune,” said Mrs Fleming, “I accompanied my husband on his jaunt from Antwerp, knowing full well that I should find Jeebon here in Edinburgh—but I did not dream that I should have the pleasure of meeting with you, my dear! You were only a girl when I saw you last—in Calcutta, wasn’t it? How the years do pass! Now I see you wife and mother.”
Saying that she was wanted downstairs to help Mrs Chambers set aright the place-cards which someone had shuffled about, Mrs MacDonald excused herself and left the two of them alone together.
“Dear girl, darling Constantia,” said Mrs Fleming gently. “How well you are looking. And is this
your own babe—or Mrs Chambers’s?”
Constantia drew back her shawl to show her sleeping daughter, a milky bubble at her lips. “Mine,” she said. “My own Livia.”
“She is perfectly beautiful, the prettiest baby I ever saw. Just your very dimple to her chin, too! But how sad it is that her brother has been taken from us. Twins . . . Mary told me.”
“Yes . . . they came rather early, too—”
“Twins often do, I believe.”
“Yes . . . and I was a seven-months baby, myself,” said Constantia.
“Were you? I remember very well the first time I saw you, a nursling in your mother’s arms—just as I see you now, with yours.”
“Won’t you sit with me a while, Mrs Fleming, and talk to me about my mother? Do, pray! I find myself thinking of her a great deal, these days. Tell me: was she not the most beautiful of all the mothers? So she always seemed to me.”
“Indeed she was; very lovely,” said Mrs Fleming, settling herself comfortably. “You are rather like her, you know. Aye, you are—as to appearance, I mean; though quite different in temper. She was always so gay that some folk thought her a little frivolous, I daresay; and she had never had any advantages of education, which she was always first to admit. But under that giddy manner, she had remarkable pluck. Aye; and courage, and resolve, and self-command, though one might not know it just at once, for none of it was showy or obvious. She had a generous compassionate heart, too. I remember once, when you were very small, we all had gone for a picnic—with the Rani and her children, too—at a garden pavilion near Dacca. And your mother, reaching under a stand for a water pitcher, suddenly drew her hand back, quite sharply. I asked what was the matter, for she looked quite frightened for a moment; but she laughed and said it was nothing; and made us all go and play on the swing, swinging all you children higher and higher, to thrill you. It was only later that evening that I found her tending to—what do you think?—a little wound on the back of her hand! She had been bitten that afternoon by a wee snake, coiled in the shadow under the water jars—but, seeing that the snake was not of the venomous kind, she had pretended that nothing was amiss. Because, she told me, she had not wanted to frighten the children.”
“Ah!” said Constantia, gratified by this proof: courage, self-command, compassion. Presently she said, “I seem to remember that you, in those days, were always stitching, stitching at a vast piece of canvaswork . . .”
“Oh, that! I came to the end of it at last,” said Mrs Fleming. “It was meant originally to cover a sofa, but by the time I had completed it, the sofa for which it was intended was nowhere to be found. Instead, I had it mounted into the headboard of our bed, after Mr Fleming and I had returned to Antwerp—and I have never taken up a piece of canvaswork since. That was more than enough for this lifetime.”
“You knew my father, Mrs Fleming, did you not? I mean, not Lieutenant Babcock, but my father, Mr Todd?”
“I did, briefly; during some two months, I suppose, aboard ship.”
“Yes, before the fatal incident at Cape Town; the Rani told me of that. What sort of man was he?”
“But I know almost nothing. Let me try to remember. It was so very long ago, wasn’t it—twenty-two or twenty-three years ago?—before you were born.” Mrs Fleming considered for some moments; and presently she said, “He was English, you know, not Scottish. He had an open and manly countenance. He was well-made, of medium height and complexion, with a lively manner, when in a good humour. He enjoyed the society and conversation of others. Of rather uncertain temper, however; and, though he loved a prank, I fear it was sometimes . . . at the expense of others.”
“Do you know his Christian name? Or where he came from? His people?”
“I do not think I ever knew his Christian name, nor where he was from—but the names Todd and Dodd are frequently heard in Northumberland. And your mother was certainly Northumbrian, for she once happened to mention that she had lived near Newcastle all her life . . . until she had, ah, eloped, with Mr Todd.”
“I don’t suppose you know what my mother’s name had been before she married?”
“Her Christian name was Maria, I remember—for I once had a letter from her, signed thus—but if ever she told me what her family name had been, I am sorry to say that I do not recall it.”
“I do wish,” said Constantia, “that the Rani had seen fit to tell me, much sooner than she did, that the bigamous Babcock was not in fact my father. I do not blame her—but matters would have gone far easier for me, if she had. So much time wasted, all on the wrong track! If I had known, I should never have squandered my efforts in looking up his people; I should have gone straightaway to look for my Todd relations instead. Indeed, I mean to do so yet, whenever I shall find the necessary time and resources at my command.”
“I daresay the Rani meant well, however,” said Mrs Fleming.
“I am sure she did. She said that as my mother had not seen fit to tell me, it was not her place to do so; and of course she’d had not the slightest grounds for suspecting that my mother’s marriage to him was a sham. No, I cannot blame her. Yet it is painful to belong to no lineage at all; to descend from nowhere, and from no one. Indeed, Mrs Fleming, I sometimes feel myself scarcely human. It may seem odd—I can hardly explain why it seems a matter of such importance and even urgency to me, to find out my ancestors—but so it is, and especially now that I am a mother myself. I cannot tell when any opportunity may offer—probably not soon!—but I do still cherish a hope of finding someday the record of my parents’ marriage in the parish registers at Gretna Green, or in that vicinity.”
“Oh; indeed?” said Mrs Fleming.
“If, however,” Constantia continued thoughtfully, “my parents eloped to Scotland from Newcastle or thereabouts, as you suggest, I ought perhaps to direct my researches first toward Berwick and the other border towns in that eastern part of the country.”
“Mm,” said Mrs Fleming.
“I have often wondered why she named me ‘Constantia.’”
“That I can tell you with certainty,” said Mrs Fleming, “for she told me herself. You were named for the celebrated sweet wine of Cape Town, which was a great favourite of hers.”
Meanwhile, downstairs, the energetic contingent which had trudged with Mrs Chambers to the former field of glory at Prestonpans returned hot, thirsty, and conscious of superior virtue. The punch bowls were soon drained; and presently the doors to the dining room, where the buffet was laid out, were thrown open. Ceremony was not to be stood upon; everyone helped themselves and their neighbors to all the good things within reach; and then guests streamed out of the house again, on the garden side, carrying well-laden plates down to their appointed places at the long banquet tables set out in rows on the grass under the trees.
Hopey came upstairs, bearing a plate for Constantia. “Not a one of those jellied quenelles remained by the time I reached the buffet,” she said, “but I did snatch for you a slice of the galantine of venison.” The plate was heaped high with ham, the aforesaid galantine, beetroot salad, prawn paste, buttery rowies, marmalade, and a honey cake.
Mrs Fleming kissed Constantia and left her, saying she must go and find her husband and Jeebon.
Constantia dined in the privacy of her room, looking down over the wagging heads lining the long tables. Such chatter, and clatter, and laughter, and talk! From this lordly height, she could pick out the heads of Mrs Fleming and Mr Fleming and Jeebon at the far end of one of the tables and, nearly across from them, Mary and Annie with the DeQuincey girls. Mrs Fleming, happening to look up, saw Constantia at her window; she spoke to the others, and they all turned to wave: Come down! Join us! But Constantia with a smile shook her head no, and gestured behind her, into the room, toward the babies. This noisy gala was more agreeable from here.
Before long, the orations and toasts and songs began. From these, Constantia gradually pieced together the reason behind the day’s revelries—for, until now, the historic events commemorat
ed on this day had been embarrassingly sketchy in her mind, she not having been born to them, as everyone else had been.
This was the gist of it: One hundred years ago, on this date, on this ground, an “army” of some 2,500 Highlanders under the command of Prince Charles Edward Stuart—scion of the exiled Stuart dynasty—had, in the course of twenty minutes just at daybreak, surprised and routed an “army” of 2,300 Lowlanders and raw English recruits under the command of General Sir John Cope, loyal to the reigning Hanoverian dynasty. A century ago, just here, the Redcoats had broken and run away—and here, therefore, a century later, the Blue Bonnets still gathered to exult.
That had not, of course, been the end of the business. Queen Victoria, now in the ninth year of her reign, was the great-great-granddaughter of that Hanoverian king whose “army” had so disgraced itself on that occasion—whereas the Stuart dynasty had dwindled meanwhile to nothing, to extinction; had dwindled to the Sobieski princes, who—handsome, lazy as lions, with legs that looked remarkably well in hose, and wearing their tartan with an air—were really, as everyone secretly knew, only the Allen brothers from Wales. No one could seriously wish them ascendant.
But the fatal reverses suffered by the Stuart cause since that glorious battle at Prestonpans made it all the more poignant to gather on this anniversary; to salute that auspicious event, when—briefly—Scotland’s future had seemed so bright.
The toasts were well under way, and someone was on his legs, declaiming: “ . . . though we observe the occasion a day early—”
“You are mistaken, sir!” interrupted a loud braying voice. “We are twelve days early! Aye; because the twenty-first of September 1745 was an Old Style, Julian calendar date—occurring before the switch to the New Style in ’52. To be quite correct, we ought to celebrate this anniversary on . . . just a moment, I am counting . . . nine, ten, eleven . . . on the second of October!”
