A Darkening of the Heart

by Margaret Thomson-Davis

  ‘Oh, Alexander, I cannot see any future in Tarbolton for me either.’

  ‘You will have plenty opportunities of marriage here. You must try not to be so impatient, sister.’

  ‘What opportunities? There is no one of any consequence for miles around but men in their dotage or country yokels.’

  ‘You seemed quite taken with Neil Guthrie. Not a man that I would recommend as a prospective suitor.’ Alexander drummed long fingers on the arm of his chair. ‘Such a pity about Charlotte. He will inherit everything.’

  ‘Like you, he has been abroad, I believe.’

  ‘Travelling, not studying. The grand tour, you know. Apparently his father left him enough fortune to indulge in such a whim.’

  ‘You do not like him.’

  Alexander hesitated. ‘There’s a coldness about the man that I find somewhat repellent. That is one reason I did not trust him with your care on Hogmanay, and for your sake I am glad he has returned to Edinburgh.’

  She shrugged. ‘I appreciate your care, brother, but surely a man of such good fortune cannot be so summarily dismissed as a bad suitor. And he seemed quite taken with me, did he not?’

  ‘But for what reason? What fortune could you expect to offer him? Father lives and spends to the best of his abilities and beyond, despite Mother’s efforts at good housekeeping. He enjoys life. As a result money keeps disappearing like snow on a sunny day in this household. And far too often, Father helps people who can only pay in eggs or meal or some animal they’ve procured illegally.’

  ‘The reason could be love and admiration.’

  ‘Oh ho, so you are still a dreamer. You have not lost your childish imagination.’

  Susanna flushed. ‘You insult me, sir.’

  ‘Not at all, my dear. I am thinking of Neil Guthrie. I cannot imagine such a cold fish marrying for love, no matter how charming and otherwise desirable the young lady.’

  ‘At least you have some diversion here with your poetry writing and your Bachelors’ Club. Now you have the Masons. I envy you, Alexander.’

  ‘Burns has become a member of the brotherhood as well.’

  ‘Good gracious alive! Do they allow anyone in then?’

  Alexander laughed. ‘You are not taken with him?’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘He is quite a ladies’ man. He’s frequently in love and I’ve seen for myself how agitated he becomes and how his passions blind him and make him endow the most ordinary servant girl with the most beautiful and angelic qualities.’ Alexander laughed and shook his head. ‘His brother Gilbert and I have both tried to bring him down to earth and talk some sense into him but all to no avail. Then if and when he’s rejected, he sinks into a terrible abyss of humiliation and despair.’

  ‘He sounds quite mad to me.’

  ‘Mm. I do suspect he suffers from some sort of nervous imbalance but I find him very interesting.’

  ‘As a doctor?’

  ‘Yes, but in other ways too. Did I tell you about the first time I met him.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Father was laid low with an attack of gout and couldn’t answer the call to visit Robert’s father, so I went in his place.’ Alexander’s grey-green eyes became vague as he remembered. ‘I found William Burns in very ill health. Consumption, I believe, not helped by the worry over the embarrassed state of his financial affairs. But he spoke very easily and clearly to me, as did his wife and his younger son, Gilbert. Gilbert struck me right away as being a very frank and modest young man. Robert, on the other hand, seemed distant and suspicious. He sat in a dark corner of the room by himself, a saturnine figure barely visible in the shadows. But I frequently detected him scrutinising me while I was conversing with his father and brother. Sitting there in the shadows, observing me with such a penetrating gaze, I found most disconcerting.’

  ‘Was it any wonder?’ Susanna gasped. ‘That would have put me right out of countenance.’

  Alexander smiled. ‘At the same time, I couldn’t help being intrigued by him. He was sizing me up, I think, before deigning to join me in conversation.’

  ‘Well, I do declare! It should have been the other way around. You are an educated and a professional man. What is he that he should take such an attitude – a common ploughman?’

  ‘Mm … A ploughman, yes, but not common, Susanna. No, I can’t in all honesty say that of him. For one thing he converses as well as, if not better and more knowledgeably, than any educated gentleman I’ve known. But even more intriguing is his ability to observe and estimate character. It seems to be intuitive. And once he gets the measure of someone, he can, too often perhaps, make them the butt of an extremely sarcastic and satirical wit. Everyone laughs at the epigrams he makes up about people. He sets his rustic circle in a roar but at the same time it makes them suspicious and afraid of him. I’ve heard his neighbours observe that he has a great deal to say for himself and that they suspect his principles. I wouldn’t be surprised if for every one friend he acquires, he makes ten enemies.’

  ‘He sounds a very uncomfortable friend to have, to say the least, Alexander. I think the quicker you get to Edinburgh and into more normal and genteel company, the better. Grandmother will no doubt introduce you to suitable young ladies.’

  ‘I had been thinking of Charlotte, but …’ He shrugged.

  ‘There will be plenty of ladies of great fortune in Edinburgh or some of the estates within travelling distance of the capital. Gentlemen too, I’m hoping. I too wanted to settle in Edinburgh but Grandmother wouldn’t hear of it. I shall have to wait for marriage to rescue me. But for how long?’ She rolled her eyes dramatically. ‘For how long?’

  Alexander laughed. ‘Don’t worry. I shall do what I can for you in Edinburgh. There should be no problem. You are very pretty. A little on the plump side, perhaps …’

  ‘Oh!’

  She flung her fan at him but he only laughed again and said, ‘Come, let us take the air. You need something to cool your ardour and impatience.’

  ‘Oh, very well.’ She reached for her dark blue cloak and Alexander donned a green knee-length coat.

  It was cold outside and Susanna put up her hood. It was quite a tight fit over her wig which she’d carefully powdered earlier with white flour. It was so annoying and frustrating not to have a maid to perform such tasks. She’d met women on her last visit to Edinburgh who had personal maids who even rouged their mistresses’ faces as well as powdered their wigs and dressed them. She did not need rouge, of course. She had a fine complexion with a natural rosy flush to her cheeks; and long curly eyelashes. She remembered fluttering them at Neil Guthrie to some effect.

  Susanna was suddenly jerked from her reverie by Alexander calling out, ‘Burns! It’s not often I see you here on an afternoon.’

  Susanna gazed wide-eyed at the man in the top boots and tight breeches now striding across the street towards them. Every man of the peasant class had natural hair cut short. Gentlemen wore wigs, or at least had powdered their own short hair. This man had long, coal-black hair gathered in a beribboned queue at the back. Not content either with the hodden grey of his fellows, his plaid was the colour of autumn leaves and he wore it a different way round his shoulders from everyone else.

  ‘Have you met my sister?’ Alexander asked.

  ‘I have not had that pleasure, sir,’ Burns said in a deep, rich voice. His eyes probed into hers and she had to avoid his stare, it discomfited her so much. She felt annoyed and she would have liked to push past him with her head in the air. But good manners forbade such an action. She held out a hand. His big hand took her small one and he bowed over it. What a brawny figure he had. She felt quite dwarfed by it.

  Alexander said, ‘Robert, this is my sister, Susanna. Susanna, Robert Burns.’

  ‘Madame,’ he said.

  ‘Sir,’ she murmured.

  Alexander had barely started a conversation with Burns when Susanna interrupted, ‘It is very cold standing here, brother. May we move on?’r />
  ‘Very well,’ Alexander said. ‘I’ll see you at the Club, Robert.’

  Robert gave another small bow.

  Afterwards, Alexander said, ‘Was it really necessary to be so abrupt, Susanna?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Alexander. I just don’t like the man.’

  Alexander gazed curiously round at her.

  ‘Are you sure about that?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Alexander shrugged. ‘He seems to have some sort of animal magnetism as far as the female sex is concerned.’

  ‘I do not like the man,’ Susanna repeated, glad of her voluminous cloak now. It hid the fact that she was trembling. ‘I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.’

  6

  Robert believed that there were two main reasons why he wrote poetry and songs. One was to express his joy of being in love. The disappointments too. He’d treasured high hopes of winning over a lovely girl with a respectable job as a housekeeper. Looks on this occasion had not been the main attraction. Her intellect was far above that of any other woman he’d known. To have a wife like that would be a dream come true.

  But it’s not her air, her form, her face,

  Tho matching beauty’s fabled Queen,

  ’Tis the mind that shines in every grace,

  An’ chiefly in her roguish e’en.

  He had been in a spellbound anxiety to make her his wife and had expressed his feelings and his proposal in carefully constructed letters. She in turn wrote briefly, rejecting him. He was deeply disappointed and unhappy as a result. But also as a result, he wrote the best songs he’d so far produced. ‘The Lass of Cessnock Banks’ and ‘I’ll Kiss Thee Yet’, ‘Montgomerie’s Peggy’ and ‘Mary Morison’. He admitted to a friend – ‘She showed an education much beyond anything I have ever met in any woman I ever dared to approach and she made an impression on my heart that I do not think the world can ever efface.’

  The other reason for writing poetry and songs was to escape or to find release from melancholy and depression. The latter had been particularly necessary during his stay at Irvine. He had gone to the town to learn how to dress flax. He and Gilbert had leased a piece of land from their father a few years previously and had cultivated flax on it. Robert thought the flax-dressing would be a new profession for him that would give him more independence than he got from agriculture and he was anxious to complete his training. He was also looking around for the means to set up a household of his own. He had quickly come to realise that his dreams of having a wife of his own and his own fireside would remain only a dream so long as he was a penniless farmer with all his time taken up battling with the soil.

  The manufacture and retailing of flax – that was the answer – and he set out with a hopeful heart and high expectations to the neighbouring town of Irvine. His high hopes were short-lived, however. He soon discovered that the work of dressing flax was carried out in heckling sheds where the smell and choking dust were unbearable. Nevertheless, because he had put what little money he had into the business in return for instruction of the proper techniques, and also because he did not easily give up on anything, he stuck manfully at it. It so affected his health and spirits however that he could barely drag himself each evening back to the Glasgow vennel where he had lodgings. It was a two-storey building with stairs on either side of the lobby. The right-hand stair was the one he had to wearily climb to reach his attic room at the back of the house. Once there, he sank into bed, struggling to cough the flax dust out of his lungs. Soon, the depressions which he had suffered on previous occasions returned to him as never before. He sank into an abyss, not only of aches and pains all over his body, but a deep, dark hopelessness of mind. Added to this distress was the growing suspicion that his partner in the flax business was dishonest. That he could not, would not, abide. ‘Whatever my faults and weaknesses,’ he told himself, ‘I am an honest man.’

  But it was his bodily weakness that became his most urgent concern. So much so that he had to send for a doctor. Doctor Fleeming called to see him five times in the space of eight days. At first he was given ipecacuanha which made him violently sick. Then a ‘sacred elixir’, as Fleeming called it, was prescribed. The elixir was a compound of rhubarb and aloes in powder form which had to be dissolved in fortified wine. It acted as a powerful laxative.

  ‘I have always believed,’ Fleeming said, ‘that the best cure for severe depression is a good vomiting and purging.’

  Continuously retching and sweating with the weakness of doing so and the pain and exhaustion of the purging of his bowels, he felt worse and far weaker after the treatment. On the next visit, the doctor plied him with opium as a painkiller. Subsequently, he was given massive doses of powdered cinchona. At one point he was so fevered and ill that his father had to make the journey to see him.

  Despite his illness, Burns continued to struggle manfully with the flax dressing. In a half-conscious nightmare, he pushed himself to work in the heckling sheds. However, he had to cancel the visit to the family home on New Year’s Day, as he’d promised his father. He wrote explaining that there was so much work to do and ‘My health is much about what it was when you were here, only my sleep is rather sounder and on the whole I am rather better than otherwise tho’ it is by very small degrees. The weakness of my nerves has so debilitated my mind that I dare not either review past events, or look forward into futurity; for the least anxiety, or perturbation in my breast produces most unhappy effects on my whole frame.’

  He made it obvious in his letter that religion was now his only comfort and said he was looking forward to the thought that perhaps very soon ‘I shall bid an eternal adieu to all the pains and uneasiness and disquietude of this weary life, for I assure you I am heartily tired of it, and, if I do not very much deceive myself, I could contentedly and gladly resign it …’

  But his stubborn spirit would not allow him to ‘resign it’ and he continued to drag himself every day to the heckling shed until only a few days later something terrible happened, owing to the drunken carelessness of his partner’s wife.

  As Robert wearily arrived for work, he was startled from his nightmare of fatigue by another nightmare. Choking smoke swirled around the bottom of the door of the heckling shed. Heat was already radiating through the flimsy panels. Then with a crackling roar, it ignited. Neighbours came clamouring to help and they quickly formed a chain. Bucket after bucket of water was hurled onto the flames, to no avail. The rosy glow lit the night sky as flames soared upwards. Sparks circled brilliantly high into the darkness.

  Knowing by now it was a lost cause, everyone – including Robert – drew back, cheeks glowing red, rivulets of sweat making streaks on soot-caked faces. Robert’s face acquired a strangely startled look caused by his eyebrows being singed from his frequent forays too close to the blaze. The heckling shed was burned to ashes and Robert thought, ‘Now I’m like a true poet, not worth sixpence.’

  Added to this disaster were worries about his father’s health and financial situation. After the fire, he was left in his cheerless garret weighed down by the darkest melancholy, and he turned to his muse for consolation. He wrote ‘A Prayer under the Pressure of Violent Anguish’ and ‘Under the Pressure of a Heavy Train of Misfortunes’ and ‘Raging Fortune’ and ‘A Prayer in the Prospect of Death’. Eventually, as his strength slowly returned, he was able to pen the defiant lines:

  Oh why the deuce should I repine,

  and be an ill foreboder?

  I’m twenty-three and five feet nine,

  I’ll go and be a sodger!

  He also wrote ‘My Father was a Farmer’, expressing how he ‘courted Fortune’s favour’ but ‘Some cause unseen still stept between, to frustrate each endeavour’. He concluded that he would now just live for the moment and that he’d rather be ‘a cheerful, honest-hearted clown’, than powerful and wealthy.

  One good thing that had come out of his otherwise disastrous stay in Irvine was his friendship with a sea captain calle
d Richard Brown. The captain had led an adventurous life but his career had been at a low ebb since an American privateer had set him ashore on the wild coast of Connaught stripped of everything. Burns felt they were companions in misfortune. He greatly admired his new friend. He had never before met a man so well-versed and knowledgeable in the ways of the world, and he was eager to learn from him. He thought him courageous and of an admirable, independent mind. In his eyes, Richard Brown was in fact full of manly virtues. He intensely loved and admired him. He tried his utmost to imitate him. It was only with women that Richard could be more foolish than himself. More than that, he talked lightly about whoring and thought nothing of relating his experiences in the stews and bordellos he’d visited in every port. Burns was horrified and repelled by these stories but even this side of his friend did not kill the admiration he had for Richard’s other more noble qualities.

  It was Richard Brown who first implanted the idea in Robert’s mind that he should get his poetry published. It seemed an incredible and impossible idea at the time. Then other things came thick and fast to crowd out any such thoughts. As soon as the winter snow melted, he had to return from Irvine to lend what support he could to his father and the rest of the family. His father was in a desperate state and everyone was worried and distressed for him. He had become involved in litigation that could lose them the farm and everything they possessed. The dispute was with his landlord who had broken his word and behaved in a manner devoid of all honour. He claimed that William Burns owed him upwards of five hundred pounds besides the current year’s rent. Burns senior denied this, and his eldest son held the ill man’s pen, helping to write his replies to the claims. Nonetheless, the family were humiliated and had to face the trauma of seeing the Sheriff’s men prying over their goods and chattels. Then they had to suffer the Tarbolton town crier going through the parish at tuck of drum warning everyone against buying any of the sequestered property.