‘Pore Miz Kitty! Oh, pore Miz Kitty!’
She put on a robe and went along to the older woman’s room. On the way, she met Harding.
In silence they gazed at the dead woman. She had been half out of bed and Jenny was lifting her and putting her back against the pillows again.
‘Close her eyes,’ Regina said, beginning to weep. ‘Close her eyes,’ she repeated, before turning away to go and get dressed.
She did not know if she wept because of sadness or exhaustion or relief. Nor did she care.
She stood at her bedroom window and stared out at the wilderness. She had never felt so much a part of it. Like one of the forest animals stirring to greet another day, a fountain of triumph rose within her and all she could think, again and again, was:
‘I have survived.’
Then she thought:
‘Now let tomorrow come.’
SCORPION IN THE FIRE
To Roger Davis
1
SIX sweat-lathered, black horses raced ahead of the billowing cloud of dust. In the middle of it bounced and jerked the coach from Port Glasgow with Will Bramstone, better known as Old Brimstone, clutching the reins and cracking his whip as he goaded the horses on to greater effort. Clinging to the back with one hand and blasting with all his lungs at the horn was his partner Hamish.
Inside the coach, Annabella tried to steady herself in order to peer out the window and catch the first glimpse of Glasgow. Through the trees on the right she had caught flashes of the River Clyde and the occasional tiny boat with its sail flapping and sparkling. Straight ahead against the blue of the sky, she sighted the silver spires of Hutcheson’s Hospital, the Tron Church and the Tolbooth. Further over to the left reared the College in the High Street. Down to the right near the river glinted the Merchant’s Hall. Crowded underneath and around these lofty edifices were the crow-stepped gables of the Glasgow tenements, and lower still huddled the thatched cottages and hovels.
Her father had told Annabella that many changes had taken place in the seven years that she’d been away. She made an attempt to lean out to get a closer look but a breeze grabbed the wide brim of her straw hat and nearly tore it from her head.
‘Hell and damnation!’
She bounced back on her seat, curls escaping untidily and cheeks afire.
Her father, Adam Ramsay, drew down his bushy brows at her.
‘Compose yourself, woman. That’s no way to talk in front of the child.’
Mungo was as excited and curious as she was. He had only been a year old when he left Glasgow and had no memories of the place. He tried to stand to see out but the mad dance of the carriage whipped him off his feet. Annabella laughed as she hoisted him up.
‘That’ll teach you, sir.’
‘Teach me what, ma’am?’ he said, trying to quell her hilarity with one of his smouldering, grown-up stares.
He was dressed like a gentleman in miniature with a green, knee-length coat, long waistcoat in a lighter shade and a three-cornered hat the same chocolate colour as the inside of the carriage. His hat had been knocked askew and his breeches darkened with the dust of the carriage floor. He looked like a little ruffian despite his silver-buckled shoes and green silk brocade.
‘To remain in your seat and behave yourself,’ Annabella said.
‘I want to see Glasgow.’
Ramsay growled.
‘Hold your impatient tongue, sir. You’ll see it soon enough.’ Then to Annabella, ‘It’s well seen he’s taken after you, mistress, and not his father, God rest his soul. And I’ll warrant you’ve been sadly neglecting his spiritual teaching. How well does he know his catechisms?’
‘Mr Blackadder was very diligent in his instruction, Papa. Never a day passed that he didn’t give us all a reading and question us on our catechism.’
‘Your husband, God rest his soul, has been dead nigh on two years. How diligent have you been, mistress? That’s what I want to know.’
‘I have been sorely tried these past two years, Papa, but I have done my best in the circumstances.’
It had indeed been a difficult and vexing time since Mr Blackadder’s death. It had taken months for the news of her plight to reach her father in Glasgow and months again for the money that she requested from him to arrive back in Virginia. In the interval she had been forced to borrow from friends. At least, she had naively imagined people like Lord and Lady Butler were her friends. They had made her a substantial loan but at the same time emphasised that it was only a matter of business because of Lord Butler’s association with her father. Socially, they had ostracised her, as if with the loss of her husband she had lost the last shreds of respectability.
Of course, the Williamsburg society had only grudgingly accepted her after the first ball she’d attended at which she had attacked Regina Chisholm. Regina had betrayed Annabella’s lover to the English dragoons after the battle of Culloden. Jean-Paul Lavelle had died a horrible death as a result and she had no regrets about what she had done to Regina Chisholm that night when she had unexpectedly come face to face with her at the ball. Williamsburg society would have ostracised her right there and then had it not been for Mr Blackadder preaching hell-fire and damnation at all of them the following Sunday.
In the old days in Glasgow Regina had been her maid. Now she worked for tobacco planter Robert Harding in Virginia. As usual, thoughts of Harding disturbed Annabella. Not so much because he had once raped her. She was a generous-hearted, exuberant woman, incapable of nursing the black emotions of hatred or revenge for very long and she had forgiven Harding for his assault upon her. What continued to irritate and disturb her was his more recent protestation of love and his stubborn determination to make her his mistress. He was a coarse brute of a man with very little refinement of manners. She did not remember seeing him wearing anything more elegant than a black coat, beige-coloured breeches and jackboots. Never, to her knowledge, had he sported a snuffbox, nor ever kissed her hand or paid her a pretty compliment. She would rather die than allow such a boor of a man to know that he was the father of her son.
Even Mr Blackadder, with his dry pawky wit, could turn a clever phrase to his advantage. She was glad that she had never disillusioned Mr Blackadder in his belief that Mungo was his child. He had been so fond of the boy.
Harding had been insensitive enough to force his way into the house not long after Mr Blackadder’s death and once again insist that she should succumb to his animal passions. It had been the devil’s own job to get rid of him that day and she had only succeeded by saying,
‘There is another man, Mr Harding. A charming gentleman of my acquaintance that I hope to see during the Public Time. He is a trifle catched by me and I by him …’
The charming gentleman of her acquaintance was Carter Cunningham. They had met several times at the social occasions of the Public Time when all the planters and others from outlying farms and plantations came to Williamsburg to vote and to enjoy themselves with their families and friends. She had not foreseen then that the female society of Williamsburg would reject and freeze her out with every means at its disposal.
She no longer received invitations to any of the balls. Tea parties gathered and gossiped in houses all around her but she was never included. Dinner guests in all their rustling finery spilled from carriages and rainbowed into dining-rooms but she was never among them.
Not that she had sat at home and moped. In the first place, she had been kept very busy with the running of the house since her maid Nancy had left to marry. She’d still had the young maid Betsy, but it had been distressing to lose Nancy. After all, they had grown up together in Glasgow. She couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t known the girl. She had been a lazy, impertinent strumpet at times and they had fought like wild cats, but they had been friends too, as close friends as a mistress and maid could be.
But it was not seeing Carter Cunningham again that cut the deepest. She was not only hurt but humiliated by the fact that the next Public
Time had come and gone and he had never called to see her. She had been so confident that once he had found out she was not being invited to the social functions he would come and whisk her away in his carriage to the very next ball. If he had led her in, no one would have dared to spurn her or turn her away. Mr Cunningham was one of the richest tobacco planters in Virginia. But he had not come and she had heard nothing from him.
‘Pox on him!’ she remembered crying out to the empty room and stamping her foot and agitating her fan. ‘Pox on the monstrous man. I care not a fig for the abominable scoundrel.’
But she had cared. During each day she had managed to retain her bright exterior and chatter gaily to Mungo or to Betsy. Alone at night, though, acutely sensitive to the creaking and clanking of carriages in Francis Street and the flare of passing lanterns in the road, she had often lost the battle with tears. They had trickled down and wet her embroidery or the book she had been pretending to read.
But all that was behind her now. Here she was ready and eager to begin life again in Glasgow despite the fact that she was nearly thirty. No one could tell her age by her appearance. She was still a beautiful woman with hair like sunshine and eyes as blue as a summer’s sky. And the low-fronted velvet gown, the same shade of blue as her eyes and the ribbons of her hat, showed that she had a shapely little figure.
The coach was rollicking along now between high parallel hedges and past thatched cottages. Hamish toot-tooted his horn and the vibration and noise brought a flush of excitement to her cheeks.
‘Look, look, Papa,’ she cried. ‘Over there before the Shawfield Mansion there’s another wondrous place.’
Her father remained sitting, hands bunched over the gold-topped Malacca cane propped between his knees. Without glancing round he said,
‘That’ll be George Buchanan’s latest ploy. You’ll remember Buchanan who built that other house? He called it Mount Vernon after his Virginian friend, George Washington’s place. Well, now he’s built this place and called it the Virginia Mansion. He’s opened up a street there too. He’s called it Virginia Street. Wicked vanity and pride is swelling the heads of too many tobacco merchants these days.’
‘You mean everyone is building mansions like that?’
She was astonished and thrilled. The Virginia Mansion was most impressive with its pavilion-shaped roof with chimney stalks in the centre and its handsome balustrade running along the eaves. A triangular entablature rose above the centre projecting part of the building and on the pinnacles elegant stone vases and ornaments were placed.
‘A wicked waste of money,’ her father said. ‘What’s good enough for our fathers is good enough for us.’
‘Fiddlesticks. There’s got to be progress.’
‘It’s vanity, I tell you. Nothing but vanity and puffed-up pride. The Lord will smite them down.’
‘Oh, Papa!’
‘Hasn’t He already shaken the threatening rod of His wrath at Glasgow in these past few years?’
‘You mean the rebellion?’ She laughed. ‘Prince Charles Edward Stuart was the threat, not God, Papa.’
‘To have had our own town invaded and our merchants all but bankrupted is no laughing matter, mistress.’
‘If they are building mansion houses they are well on the way to recovery, sir.’
She held onto her hat as the carriage jolted and jarred every bone in her body. She was aching and exhausted but the fact that at last they had arrived in Glasgow infused her with new energy. The high bushes and banks of yellow broom and the thatched cottages had shrunk away behind the coach and she was able to get a close look at the Virginia Mansion as they passed it. Then the Shawfield Mansion. Then came the tenements and the lively, crowded Trongate Street.
It reminded her of Williamsburg at the Public Time, but the Public Time only happened twice a year. At other times the town of Williamsburg was quiet and deserted. Here in Glasgow it was crowded and noisy and busy and exciting every day of the year except Sundays. The Williamsburg streets were wider and the houses much larger with gardens all around, but it was good to see the Glasgow tenements again. They were tall, stately structures of stone with gables to the front, resting on a row of piazzas. Into these piazzas or covered archways, people were crowding to see the goods displayed or to squeeze into the dark shops or booths behind. Out in the open air of Trongate Street there were stalls higgledy-piggledy all over the road but especially around the Cross attended by market women in blue duffle cloaks with hoods drawn forward over their heads.
Hamish blew violently at his horn but it was only with much difficulty that they cleared a path and swung right down Saltmarket Street and into their close. Yet even at the back of the building people were doing business. Beside the middens and dung heaps, byre-women milked cows and butchers bloodied the earth with meat for sale.
Annabella had to sit for a few minutes after the coach came to a halt outside the round tower stairway. Even then it took all her will-power and the helping hand of her father to ease her to the ground.
‘Losh and lovenendie. A more dreadful road cannot be imagined. It was a miracle that the coach did not overturn.’ Spreading out her skirts she dusted them down as best she could. Her stays dug into her waist and breasts and she felt bruised and stiff. ‘Are you all right, Mungo?’
The child had struggled from the vehicle unaided and was standing wide-eyed watching the butchers hacking at carcasses with long knives. The men were covered in blood. Blood had dried darkly on their clothes and glistened scarlet on their hands and arms as if they had no skin.
Then suddenly into the close came a bustle of ladies shepherding a young lad of about Mungo’s age in a blue silk coat.
‘Annabella! Annabella!’ the ladies called.
Annabella clapped her hands in genuine delight.
‘Mistress Halyburton! Griselle! Phemy! Oh, it is wondrously good to see you again.’
Mistress Halyburton was a rigid-backed woman in a mahogany-coloured dress and powdered hair.
‘Aye, Mistress Blackadder.’ She managed to subdue her pleasure before favouring Annabella with a prim kiss on the brow. ‘Still as perjink as ever, no doubt?’
Her daughters were more enthusiastic in their embrace. Griselle’s ruddy cheeks vied with the flame-coloured dress she was wearing. Even Phemy’s pocked unhealthy face was coloured with excitement and the colour, if not the face, made a pretty contrast against her turquoise gown. Both young women hugged Annabella until she had to push them away.
‘Losh sake, if I don’t get a cup of tea or a dram or something to revive me after that monstrous journey, I shall drop in my tracks and you shall have to carry me upstairs.’
With squeals of sympathy they grabbed Annabella’s arms and swooped her towards the protruding round tower at the back of the building. The stairway was dark and they had to lift their skirts to protect them from the dung and urine of tramps and vagabonds who had slept on the stairs during the night.
Annabella screwed up her nose.
‘Lord’s sakes,’ she said, ‘what a noisome place!’
‘It’s no different from when you last saw it, mistress,’ Letitia Halyburton snapped.
‘More’s the pity,’ Annabella said.
She had forgotten how cramped and filthy the tenements were. She was accustomed to much better things now.
‘What a fine big lad Mungo has turned out to be,’ Phemy said when they arrived in the flat. ‘I have a little daughter, as you know, but I couldn’t bring her out today. She has a feverish cold.’
‘I’m looking forward to seeing her, Phemy.’
Letitia gripped her hands beneath her long bosom and raked Annabella with an accusing stare.
‘Your Mungo doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to Mr Blackadder.’
Annabella loosened the ribbons of her hat, willing her hands not to tremble.
‘Indeed he does not, Mrs Halyburton. I have always said that Mungo has more a look of his grandfather than his Papa. The Ramsay strain must b
e strong,’ she laughed, ‘because I see my brother Douglas in your son George, Griselle.’
Griselle stiffened with displeasure. She had no great love for her husband, Douglas Ramsay, and regarded him as a weak-willed, affected fop.
‘He may look like his father but he takes after me, nevertheless.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Annabella tossed aside her hat, then with a big sigh gazed around. ‘It’s good to be back.’
And she meant it, despite the low-beamed ceilings and tiny windows filtering in thin slices of light. Despite the noise bombarding the room from outside. Despite the chattering of women and the guffawing of men. Despite the rhythmic tattoo of horses’ feet. Despite the racket of street cries.
‘Bellows to mend!’ a man with lungs like bellows was roaring.
‘Knives to grind!’ chanted another.
A woman was singing:
‘Herrings, fresh herrings. Come buy my fresh herrings!’
A man selling rabbits slung on a pole which he carried on his shoulders joined in the bedlam:
‘Rabbits, rabbits, ho!’
Another was loudly competing with,
‘Buy my goose, my fat goose!’
‘Lavender!’ A young woman joined in the chorus. ‘Lavender, sweet lavender!’
Annabella felt like singing too. There was a bouncy rumbustiousness about Glasgow that suited her and already her senses were tingling with excitement for the interesting, lively, challenging times to come.
‘I’ve ordered chairs for the four of us,’ Letitia said, swinging her skirts over one arm in preparation to leave. ‘Your father can bring the boys.’ She had prepared a meal at her own house along Trongate Street to celebrate Annabella’s return. Annabella’s brother and Griselle’s husband, Douglas Ramsay, was going to be there, also Phemy’s husband, the Earl of Glendinny, and Andrew Halyburton, brother of Griselle and Phemy. ‘Where’s Nancy and Betsy?’ she added, suddenly remembering about Annabella’s maids.
The Tobacco Lords Trilogy Page 60
