The Physic Garden

by Catherine Czerkawska

  ‘I knew nothing!’ he was saying. ‘Oh, William, I swear I knew nothing until you told me! Why didn’t she come to me? Why didn’t she tell me? Why? Why? Dear God, she should have told me!’

  I looked at his tormented face. I saw the tears streaming down and the colour all gone, except for two bright spots of red on his cheeks. He had his hands over his mouth and he was retching. And then he leaned against the outer wall of the dissecting rooms and threw his head back against the stones, banging his skull there, until you could see a patch of blood and hair on the stone.

  I put my hand out to him in alarm at his vehemence. ‘Stop it!’ I said. ‘Stop it, Thomas! You’re wounding yourself!’

  ‘I should do more than wound myself! It’s my fault. Dear God, man, don’t you see? It’s my fault! God help me, what have I done? What have I done!’

  I looked at him again and a dreadful calm came upon me. I had a sudden bizarre thought that it was like Mr Caddas’s weaving loom when everything fell into place and the true pattern emerged from the confusion of flying shuttles and coloured wools. The scales fell from my eyes and I saw just what a fool I had been. I had assumed – with no evidence of any other liaison – that the father of Jenny’s child was some weaver, perhaps a married man, and that was why she would not name him. Well, I had been right in one particular at least. He was a married man. I thought of all those occasions when Jenny had been invited to stay at Thomas’s house to do this or that piece of work: the dress for Marion, the drapes for the bedroom, the waistcoat for Thomas. I thought of his charm, and the attention he had paid to her. I thought of how his attention had made me feel, how I would have done almost anything to please him. How flattering it must have been for a young woman like Jenny! I saw it all with astounding clarity: Thomas, casually enchanting her. My Jenny, adoring him, following wherever he led her.

  When had he first taken her to his bed I wonder? Had it been often, or only one lapse? I knew that Marion went to Edinburgh to visit her family, taking the children with her. Had there been occasions when he had contrived to be in the house overnight at the same time as Jenny, with his wife absent? There were other servants in the house, of course, but that made it look all the more respectable. If he was circumspect, nobody would have suspected. Jenny herself had told me how they were so kind, the Browns, because they gave her a bed chamber of her own, a small room with its own fireplace and a good fire to keep her warm in the evenings, even though she would have expected to be sharing one of the maids’ rooms up in the attic with the other lassies.

  It flashed before my eyes in an instant. Jenny had been carrying Thomas’s child. By the time he found out, she had been away to Dumfries and – what seems so much worse to me now – he had taken the decision to do nothing about it. When she went missing he had deluded himself into thinking that she had found shelter elsewhere. He must have been worried that she would return with or without the child. And equally worried that she would not return at all. But perhaps he had hoped that she would return with the child, that I would do as he expected (he knew me, to that extent, better than I knew myself), would find it in my heart to take Jenny in marriage and bring up the child as my own.

  What he had not expected, of course, was that in her desperation and misery, she would leave Dumfries and come back to Glasgow, seeking the father, intending perhaps to throw herself on his mercy. God knows what would have happened if she had reached her destination. Would Jenny have confessed all to Marion? Would she have been believed? Would Thomas have managed to intercept her? And what then? Maids who ‘got themselves into trouble’ (a curious expression with a flavour of impossibility about it) were seldom believed when they named the fathers of their ill-gotten weans, particularly when those fathers were gentlemen. It would have been easier for Marion to believe me to be the culprit in spite of my protestations of innocence.

  But then it struck me that what was commonplace – and deemed to be generous – was for the gentleman in question to arrange a marriage with some trusted servant and set the young couple up with a good dowry. Sometimes the child might be fed and clothed and educated as well. I have no doubt at all that, even if Jenny had turned up at his door in her shift, this is exactly what Thomas would have done. Marion would have been hurt and angry but she would have accepted the situation. I saw all too clearly that I would have been cast in the role of trusted servant. I would undoubtedly have married Jenny. But the friendship between Thomas and me would have been damaged beyond repair, and I think he knew that too and wished to avoid it, if at all possible.

  Eventually I found out a few more details of her death, although even reading about them was painful beyond belief. The journey back to Glasgow had taken her a very long time and who knew what privations she had suffered along the way? She had fetched up at the door of a house of correction, not too far from Thomas’s house, exhausted and in pain. I managed to establish this much later, writing to Professor Jeffray for such information as he could give me. He replied soberly, with kindness even, offering no false solace where none was to be had, and I respected him for that, ever afterwards. He was a better and much more compassionate man than I had given him credit for. She had gone into labour with the child, dying of exhaustion and shock before she could even give birth and taking her unborn infant with her. The correction house had contacted the professor, who had asked them to keep an eye out for just such a ‘specimen’ – a woman dying in late pregnancy or early childbirth, upon whom he might demonstrate the efficacy of his chain saw in the terrible process of symphysiotomy. The infant had been a girl. I hadn’t asked, hadn’t wished to know, but Jeffray had mentioned it himself in his letter, referring to Jenny and the child as ‘the mother and her baby girl’ without further explanation.

  But all that came much later. For the moment, I could see only that I had been cruelly betrayed by the best friend I ever had. The realisation struck me like a physical pain, like a blow to the chest. Thomas stretched out his hand to me, but I cast him off and then – because I really think I might have killed him if I had stayed – I ran away into the streets of the town and down towards the river. I came to myself only much later on that day, in the countryside where I had been wont to gather specimens for him, sitting on a stone beside the burn where we had once guddled for trout and weeping as if my very heart were broken.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  False Friends

  He tried to speak to me on several occasions. I think he wanted to make some attempt to explain, but I wouldn’t listen, would neither see him, nor speak to him. He had betrayed Jenny in the worst possible way, but more than that, he had betrayed me. I thought I would never forgive him. He had betrayed himself as well, the ultimate betrayal for a man who thought of himself as the possessor of an enquiring mind: he had refused to believe the evidence. Even when I had told him that Jenny was expecting a child, I think he had somehow managed to deny the very possibility that the child could be his. Perhaps he thought I was lying about the chastity of my own relationship with the lass. I don’t know and the time for asking him such things is long past. All I know is that when you lose a friend in this way, a man you have loved deeply, as I loved Thomas, when you see that he has betrayed you in this, perhaps the worst of all possible ways, it somehow calls into question everything about your life. Nothing can ever be the same again. You can be sure of nothing, trust nothing and nobody in quite the same way again.

  It is as if you have sailed through life, encountering problems and difficulties to be sure, but always with a strong undercurrent of friendship to bear you up. When it is removed as swiftly and suddenly as my faith in Thomas had been removed – and by his own actions at that – you find yourself sinking into some vortex of pain. It was a sickness deep inside me. I think I would have more readily forgiven Jenny than I ever forgave Thomas. For her, perhaps, it would have been a momentary lapse. He would have charmed her as he charmed everyone who came into his orbit. He was a powerful man, and powerfully attractive to men and wom
en alike. Her body would have betrayed her and I could not blame her. If it was true of the lads, why not of the lassies? She was beyond interrogation. How could I do anything but forgive her?

  But Thomas! Ah, I still think Thomas ought to have known better. He ought to have known me better. He ought to have thought of me and remembered what I was to him and he to me. And so I splashed and struggled through life for a time, drowning in a sea of self-pity. How could he? How could he? I would walk out into the countryside so that I could howl the words aloud, screaming them against the wind. But there was no answer save the rooks that shrieked their chorus, swaying above me in the trees, like sailors perched aloft. When the rage inside me became too much to bear, I would go down to the great river and watch the women doing their washing along the banks. There was something soothing in the sight of them with their buckets and baskets, their aprons and skirts kilted up above the knee, their sturdy legs and strong arms, something soothing and timeless in their repetitive movements, the necessary treading and pummelling of linen, the rinsing and folding. They looked askance at me at first and there were jeers and catcalls, but I think they grew used to me, thought me some kind of lunatic, but harmless enough withall. Sink or swim. Sink or swim, I thought. Well, eventually, I swam. I survived.

  But it was entirely down to my own efforts and when I came through, staggering onto dry land, finding my feet again, I knew that not only would I never trust Thomas again, but I would never trust anyone so completely and wholeheartedly as I had trusted him. He had persuaded me to think the best of him. Well, more fool me. And I was minded of something my father had once told me. ‘Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.’

  Of course, I would find it in my heart to love again. I have made a good life for myself and those who won my affection. But never again would I give that affection so fondly and freely as I had once given it to Thomas and to Jenny, without the perception that it was but a precarious thing at best, that I could no more judge the truth of others by my own faithfulness than it is possible to judge one growing season by another. Nothing is safe. It can all come crashing down in an instant.

  Except now perhaps. Except with my grand-daughter, Jenny. Who loves me with such unfailing and wholehearted devotion that I cannot help but return it. I expect nothing in return. I love her without any desire for return of love. I will love her selflessly, and whatever fate brings, till I die. There is nothing she could ever do, physically or morally, which will alter that. Which should, I suppose, teach me something. That in order to truly love another being, we must expect nothing whatsoever in return. We must love selflessly, and entirely without hope of reward. I would give my life for her without a moment’s thought, and I know that this commitment to her has been my salvation. It is this, perhaps, more than anything else, that has allowed me to remember the whole story, to accept Thomas’s gift to me and to sit here reading his final letter to me. But first I must finish my tale, tell you what happened immediately after the events of Professor Jeffray’s dissecting rooms.

  Sick at heart, I at last recovered myself sufficiently to return home. My mother could see that there was something terribly wrong. Rab came and offered me a drink of ale, and put his hand on my knee. ‘You’re awfy sad,’ he said, and I agreed that I was indeed ‘awfy sad’, but it was nothing that he had done and nothing that he could remedy either. When he was settled for the night in the box bed in the wall, all cosy and warm against the wintry draughts, my mother tried to quiz me about the events of the day. I told her nothing except that Jenny had died. She had been on her way home from Dumfries and had met with some terrible misfortune. Even that small manipulation of the truth almost choked me. When she tried to question me further, I begged her to be silent, for I knew no more than that. I was too busy thinking about what I was going to do next. I would have to tell Mr Caddas that his daughter was dead. I would have to tell Anna that her sister was dead and I was not relishing the thought. I couldn’t possibly explain any of what had happened, and my mother was stricken into silence by her own shock and sorrow at the news.

  I made up my mind that I would have to leave the college garden at once, but would go and throw myself on the mercy of Faculty, asking them if my mother and brothers might remain in the house for a few months until I could find myself other work, and set up some kind of establishment, however meagre, that would house them. And this they agreed to do, not wanting to be responsible for casting my family out onto the street. They did it, I think, in memory of my father and not as a favour to me. They did not enquire too closely as to the reason for my sudden decision. Perhaps they thought I had already found work elsewhere. Perhaps they simply didn’t care. There were more weighty, more scholarly matters on their minds. But it occurs to me to wonder, at this distance in time, whether Professor Jeffray, knowing something of what had passed, and perhaps guessing much of the rest, had a hand in the matter, and tried to make things easier for me. As I said, I fear I may have underestimated his good nature all along. He was a better man than I thought him. A far better man than Thomas.

  The following day I went to see Mr Caddas, only to find that he already knew. Coming to his senses somewhat, Thomas had retrieved the mutilated body from a mortified Jeffray. Without explaining anything of his role in the affair – which was perhaps just as well, for Caddas would have killed him if he had known the truth – he had offered his condolences to the bereaved father and insisted on paying for a decent funeral. Much against his inclination, Caddas had accepted. In the normal course of events, he would have had no trouble in paying for the funeral himself, but his resources were all exhausted because he had spent so long in the fruitless search for his daughter.

  Thomas had the good grace not to attend the funeral or, if he did, he lurked well out of sight at the back of the kirkyard. I did not see him there but after the bleak service I went down to Jenny’s wintry garden and with the cold bringing tears to my eyes, I told the bees. The hives were silent, dormant, lifeless, and if any heard me, they gave no sign. Caddas, as was only to be expected, was devastated by the death of his daughter. Soon after, however, he married his neighbour, Nancy Mackenzie, the widow he had been courting for so long. I think their mutual grief – for she had treated Jenny as her own daughter – drew them even more closely together and eventually they achieved a kind of contentment. I hope so, for he was a good man and these events were none of his doing.

  Anna was no fool. She knew that there was more to the tale than met the eye, but she could not fathom the way it truly was and was forced to accept the version of events that her father had given her. He believed it to be the truth himself and I never told her anything different. The story went like this. Jenny had been with child, but the child was not mine. If the child had been mine, I would have married her with all speed. I would have married her anyway, but she was not to know that, because she had insisted upon going away. She had been badly treated by her cousins in Dumfries, but had told nobody because she felt ashamed of herself. She had decided to leave that town and come home. Too late, I had gone to find her. Perhaps our paths had crossed but we had not met. She had been taken ill on the way and fetched up at the house of correction, where she had died of some fever contracted on the road. Thomas, who had been looking for her at my request, had found her there before she could give birth, too late to do more than send her home in her coffin and arrange for the funeral.

  One more thing I did. I took my precious book, The Scots Gard’ner, from its high shelf, parcelled it up and sent it back to Thomas. I put no note with it. I put his name on the parcel and sent James to deliver it to the house. Except for the time when I returned the money to him, that was the last occasion upon which I ever wrote his name. James was told to say that there was no reply expected, and to come away immediately, which was what he did.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Loose Ends

  That last tissue of truth and falsehood is the version of events my wife had always known and I’m sur
e she continued to believe it until the day she died, some five years ago now. It feels as though it were last week and I still miss her. I still go to the kirkyard from time to time and find myself unable to believe that she is lying down there, where I too will follow her in due course.

  But it was not the whole truth. And I have waited this many a long year to come to the whole truth of the matter. How can I explain? Until that moment, when I saw Jenny lying upon the dissecting table, the whole of my life for many years past had been concerned with growing things, with the care and nurture of plants and trees. Well, my green time ended with Jenny. Since then, I have worked with books and dusty manuscripts and the truths contained therein, the wisdom of words. And sometimes, I have found myself following a perilous path indeed, for words and books and pamphlets can lead you into trouble as surely as affairs of the heart. I have often found myself negotiating that narrow pathway between my principles and the safety of myself and my family. They hang men for their beliefs, for their writings and even for their thoughts, but not, I think, for tending their gardens.

  Do I regret the loss of that green time? Of course I do. I sometimes think I would give half my life to be back there, wandering through the countryside, gathering plants for Thomas with the prospect of meeting Jenny on the way home. Or to be back upon that hillside on the Isle of Arran, carefully loosening the earth from around the roots of a tiny whitebeam that clings to life on the edge of a precipice. But perhaps because of all that I have read and learned since, perhaps because of the dangers and the injustices I have known in my life, there is that in my mind that baulks at the prolongation of lies and half truths any longer.