‘I’m sorry, Mama.’ Augusta returned to the bell-pull. Both a mental and physical agitation were building up in her so that she no longer felt in command of herself. She was a small craft at the mercy of a stormy and uncharted ocean.
In between sipping her tea, her mother kept moaning and holding her handkerchief to her temple and repeating:
‘What are we going to do? What are we going to do? The lieutenant will have to be told for a start. Oh, the shame of it! When I think of how Mr and Mrs Fitzjames will never again be able to regard you as sweet or innocent or modest, since you are none of these things, you dreadful, shocking creature . . . .’
Beginning to sniffle, she laid aside her cup to dab at her eyes and revive herself with smelling-salts. ‘How could you do this to me, Augusta? All the arrangements will have to be changed. The wedding date will have to be brought forward. I can’t bear it . . . . Gossiping tongues will wag. Something must be done to allay people’s suspicions.’
Suddenly she sat erect. ‘The lieutenant could arrange for an immediate posting abroad. Yes, that would be a believable excuse. The wedding date would quite understandably then have to be brought forward.’ She relaxed back against the cushions. ‘Thank God! But, mercy, what a rush it’s going to be.’
Just then Cameron strode into the room.
‘What’s wrong, Mrs Cameron? Are you ill? I have come as fast as I could. I knew you would not send to my office unless something serious had happened.’
‘Oh, Mr Cameron!’ Felicity’s tears returned and she stretched out her arms to her husband.
He hastened to sit beside her on the sofa and nurse her close to him. ‘Tell me what is wrong. Why are you so distraught?’
‘You will find this hard to believe, Mr Cameron,’ Felicity sobbed against his chest, ‘and I am sorry that you have to hear it, but hear it you must. Tell your papa, Augusta. Go on. Tell him!’
‘Mama says I am with child, Papa.’
The clock on the mantelshelf ticked loudly through the horrified silence. Cameron’s face sagged with shock and his fleshy lips hung open. Eventually, his eyes shifting about, not looking at either woman, he spoke.
‘Is this true?’
‘Oh, I don’t think there’s any doubt about it,’ Felicity replied.
‘My own daughter,’ Cameron’s voice gathered righteous indignation, ‘guilty of fornication! Despite the good Christian upbringing I’ve tried to give her. You know what it says in the Good Book?’ he turned, eyes now bulging with anger on Augusta. ‘You know what it says about filthy fornicators?’
‘Mercy upon us, Mr Cameron, talk about the Bible or anything else won’t help us now. We have got to do something. The wedding date will have to be brought forward for a start.’
‘How do you propose we do that?’
‘You’ll have to write the lieutenant a letter and send it off immediately by special messenger.’
‘God know how long it will take even by special messenger. The weather is still not dependable.’
‘But it would be better than waiting for the Mail, would it not?’
‘I suppose so.’ Cameron poured himself a large whisky, then went over to the writing-desk. He thumped down on a chair in front of it.
‘Forgive me, Papa—’ Augusta began.
‘No, I shall not forgive you, Augusta. Your behaviour has been unforgivable. And you have caused your mother and myself great and quite unnecessary distress. A few months was surely not too long to expect you to wait before sleeping with Lieutenant Fitzjames?’
Augusta had begun to tremble so much the tight grip of her hands seemed the only thing that was holding her together. Even her clusters of ringlets were shivering.
‘I didn’t sleep with Lieutenant Fitzjames, Papa.’ Eyes, enormous and vulnerable, waited in apprehension.
‘Spare us the sordid details,’ Felicity cried. ‘What does it matter where it happened?’
‘But, Mama, doesn’t it matter if the lieutenant knows it wasn’t him?’
‘You stupid girl! Of course he’ll know it was him. He had his way with you, hadn’t he?’
‘No.’
‘Could you credit such deceit? Could you credit it. Mr Cameron? As if we haven’t been deceived enough already.’
‘It wasn’t my fault, Mama. I tried to stop him.’
Cameron groaned. ‘I think she’s gone wrong in the head as well. First she says he didn’t, then he did, then . . . .’
‘It was the night of the blizzard, Papa. It was Gunnet I was with.’
In the silence that rocked the room, Felicity’s face acquired an idiotic expression. Cameron rose, looking stunned in disbelief.
‘Gunnet? You mean Gunnet is responsible? You mean it’s his child? Gunnet?’
All of a sudden Felicity let out a high-pitched wail, making Augusta leap to her feet in alarm.
‘The coachman? A common servant?’ her mother screeched.
‘Oh, Mama, please . . . .’ Augusta ran across the room to try to loosen Felicity’s clothing or do something, anything to help her, for her hysterics reached such abandon that she was making strange noises that sounded indeed as if she had taken a fit.
‘A common servant! Everybody will know. Get her away from me. No wedding. Nothing but shame and disgrace. Keep her away from me. Don’t let her touch me. I never want anything to do with her again.’
Cameron strode over, jerked his daughter roughly aside and then, to her astonishment and pain, crashed the back of his hand against her face.
‘You filthy slut! Get out of this house and don’t come back.’
The loathing in his eyes shocked her. She remained staring up at him in bewilderment until he grabbed and forcibly hurtled her from the room.
In the cool, quiet hall she could still hear her mother’s screams, now muffled by the heavy doors.
In a daze she wandered from the house, through George Square and away down Queen Street. A cold wind knifed through her dress and ruffled her curls, but she was hardly aware of it. It was as if she moved in a dream. Then some children running past bumped into her, making her clutch at a shop door lintel to save herself from falling. It was then that she realised she was in Argyle Street.
She gazed around. Never before in her life had she been out alone, and never without a carriage. The teeming thoroughfare with its side streets and wynds leading from it looked alien, threatening. She felt lost on the edge of a dark continent.
Chapter Eight
A tangle of noise and strange cries swirled around her.
‘Buy a trap! A rat trap! Buy my trap!’
The man had a nose black with warts, a long chin and small, shifty eyes like those of the rat he was carrying in one of the cages slung over his arm. Augusta averted her gaze from the revolting apparition. A dog was following the man, barking loudly and ceaselessly.
Jostled along by the crowd, Augusta became more and more aware of noise. It battered at her temples and reeled inside her head. Towering tenements on either side of the cobbled street contained the bedlam-like prison walls.
The Tron Church across the road with its square, dumpy tower jutting out from the tenements made the thoroughfare narrower at that part of the street. Further along on the side on which she was walking she passed the elegant arches of the Tontine Hotel. Beyond that reared the Tolbooth clocks chiming high above the heedless milling throng. Past the Cross she found herself in Gallowgate Street. The very name frightened her and she hesitated, allowing herself to be pushed aimlessly this way and that.
Suddenly a deafening cheer arose from the crowd. It confused her more than ever until she saw the reason for it, in the shape of the Royal Mail coach with its four steaming black horses racing towards the Cross, with the guard blowing lustily at his bugle.
Then she was swept onwards like a leaf in the wind in her green dress, and the coach disappeared from her bewildered gaze. Now the tenements looked meaner. Archways or tunnel-like openings in the buildings led to narrow passageways between t
hem. Along these passages a forest of poles jutted from windows on either side. On the poles flapped rags of wet clothing.
The shops became smaller than those of Argyle Street and Trongate Street. Ancient shops with bow windows with tiny panes of glass had shutters folded back against the walls. Shops like caverns had no windows at all. In the shadows of one of these she saw a cobbler bending low over his lathe. A hooked nose stuck out grotesquely from his close-fitting leather hat, making him look like an evil gnome. A grocer’s shop now, the smell of food adding pangs of hunger to her distress. She stopped in utter helplessness, not knowing which way to turn, and rain came whipping along with the wind to prick her face and make her blink. Within minutes her ringlets were straggling wetly across her cheeks, and trailing down on to her white collar. The dampness of her dress made her shiver.
‘This is my pitch!’ a woman’s voice suddenly shouted close to her face. ‘F. . . off, you cow, or I’ll scratch your eyes out.’ The woman grabbed her arm and pitched her forward with such force that Augusta stumbled and fell. Some people in the crowd laughed, and no one came to her assistance until as she was struggling up from the muddy ground a voice cried,
‘Och, would you look at the poor wee sowl.’
An arm went around her and helped her to her feet.
‘Holy Mother of God, you shouldn’t be out on a day like this, and without even a bonnet to your head or a shawl to your shoulders.’
Augusta stared at her rescuer. A witless grinning face stared back. She had seen it before but couldn’t remember where.
‘Come away with Biddy. Mistress Nessie’ll give you a seat at the fire.’
Augusta allowed herself to be led back towards the Cross and then along Trongate Street and Argyle Street.
‘Nessie sent me to the Colonel’s Old Shop for sugar,’ Biddy the skivvy confided. ‘It’s in the Gallowgate and it was cheaper, so it is.’
She went on chattering but the rain and wind snatched away her words as soon as they were uttered. Augusta did her best to stumble along beside the girl. Her mind was now completely paralysed by her physical discomforts. Her white kid shoes with their soft soles and dainty cross-straps tied round her ankles were like paper against the cutting edge of stones. Mud filled them, squelching icily between her toes. Her dress flapped wetly against her shivering body and she had to keep tearing the plaster of hair from her face so that she could see where she was going.
Up Queen Street now and into George Square, the sight of the house blanking her mind with confusion. Before she could form coherent thought, Biddy had hurried her into West George Street and cut to the left again into a courtyard, where a steep flight of stone stairs led down to a doorway she had never seen before. When it opened she found herself in the kitchen quarters of Cameron House. Even this was not a familiar place. She had seldom set foot in it, preferring to summon the servants to the parlour when she had to pass on any of her mother’s orders.
The Cameron kitchen was a warm cavern. From inside the house it was reached by a door underneath the hall staircase that led down more stairs to another door, opening into the kitchen area. At the other end a door led out to the stone stairs and yard. The window next to the back door looked out on to these stairs, and so didn’t get much light, but the blazing fire at which Nessie the cook laboured brightened the place and gave it a welcoming glow.
A long scrubbed wooden table in the middle of the floor was surrounded by plenty of chairs, one of which with wooden arms and a knitted cushion was Nessie’s throne. There, between the serious business of stirring pots and rolling pastry, she rested her bad legs. The stone flagged floor was cruel to the rheumatics and varicose veins. The shelves and a dresser nearby were adorned with russet and cream patterned crockery. The light from the open range reflected cosily on dinner plates, side plates and saucers propped up on end, and cups and jugs dangling on hooks, and soup and vegetable tureens crowding the top of the cupboard with a brass oil lamp.
A tap under the window indicated that water had been piped into the kitchen, but water did not always appear when the tap was turned on, and this unreliability proved an excruciating worry when any of the Camerons demanded a bath and enough water needed to be carried upstairs to one of the bedrooms to fill the tin bath. A much smaller room off the kitchen was where Nessie and her husband Sid Cruickshanks slept and kept their personal belongings, while the rest of the servants slept in cupboards of attic rooms under the roof of the house.
On seeing Augusta now, Nessie’s eyes squeezed shut and bulged open again so energetically that her cap, inside which was bundled a surfeit of white hair, wobbled about on her head. Sid removed the pipe from his mouth, contemplated Augusta’s bedraggled figure then replaced the pipe and studied the door behind her. McPherson, immaculate in a bombazine dress and white apron, stood staring at Augusta with a faintly contemptuous air.
‘Would you look at the poor wee sowl?’ Biddy announced to them. ‘Out without a bonnet or a shawl, so she was.’
Nessie was the first to recover. Bustling over to Augusta she led her to the high-backed chair by the fire.
‘Fiona,’ she snapped, ‘go upstairs and pack a bag with Miss Augusta’s things. Her hair brush and comb. All her toilet things and her nightdress and underclothes and dresses and cloaks. As much as you can get in.’
‘I can’t do that!’ McPherson protested. ‘What’s the mistress going to say?’
‘Do as you’re told and less of your cheek. The mistress never goes into that room. Anyway, they’re Miss Augusta’s things and she needs them down here. Tibs, stop that whimpering. Go and put clean sheets on my bed. And you, Biddy, fill a hot-water jar. I’ll make her a hot drink.’
‘You’re surely not going to let her go to bed in your room?’ McPherson said. ‘You’re surely not going to let her stay here!’
‘Och, and why not, eh?’
‘There’ll be trouble for us all if the master and mistress find out, that’s why not.’
‘They needn’t find out if we’re careful,’ Nessie said.
Nessie was busy squeezing lemon into a jug. ‘Away and get the young mistress some dry clothes before she catches her death.’
‘Mistress?’ said McPherson. ‘Not any more, from what I’ve heard.’
Sid separated himself from his pipe. ‘The way I see it is, just because a lady’s suffering unfortunate circumstances it can’t be said she’s not a lady. It seems to me she’s a lady born and nothing can change that.’
McPherson swished away without a word.
‘Here’s your hot drink, Miss Augusta.’ Nessie was bending over her and Augusta had the impression of a mobile face flushed with firelight and silvered with tufts of hair.
‘Och, she’s shivering owr much to hold it, so she is.’
Biddy’s face alongside Cook’s now, grinning toothlessly.
Hands steadying hers and assisting the cup to her lips. The glorious comfort of the steaming liquid. But still she shivered and shook, and gazed helplessly around.
‘Of course,’ Sid said between slow puffs at his pipe, ‘it’s not going to be easy.’
‘There’s extra mattresses,’ his wife assured him. ‘We can make up a bed on the floor out here for ourselves.’
‘I meant it’s not going to be easy to keep the young mistress hidden. Not for any length of time, it seems to me. The way I see it, it’s not just Biddy we would have to worry about. It would be Fiona McPherson as well.’
Tibs came running from Nessie’s room. ‘I’ve made the bed.’
‘Don’t just stand there hugging that hot-water bottle like a daftie,’ Nessie snapped at her. ‘Put it between the sheets.’
The bewhiskered face bent over Augusta again, the bulging cap above it balancing like a white dumpling on a frill.
‘Don’t worry, Miss Augusta, you’ll feel better when you finish that up and get into a nice warm bed.’ Then to Sid: ‘I can deal with Fiona.’
‘Yes, you’re a capable woman,’ Sid conceded to t
he door. ‘And I’m not saying Fiona’s a bad girl. No, I’m not saying that at all. But you know and I know who she’s soft on.’
‘Don’t mention that rascal’s name,’ Nessie warned, hitching up her face. ‘Just wait till he comes back! Just wait, that’s all.’
Gently she raised Augusta and led her across the kitchen and into a windowless room hardly bigger than the cupboard in her bedroom upstairs where her trunk and old rocking horse and other miscellaneous possessions were stored.
‘Tibs,’ Nessie called, ‘come on and help me get these wet clothes off. And Biddy, bring her other things through as soon as Fiona comes back.’
The room was lit by a candle stuck on a cracked saucer on a table beside the bed. By its dim flickering light, Augusta made out an old double-bed, a chest of drawers, a small hanging looking-glass very clouded and cracked, and a pegged board screwed to the wall, on which dangled a few articles of clothing. Above this was a shelf which held some boxes. On the plain wooden floor was a rag rug.
‘Here’s your nighty, Miss Augusta,’ Nessie was saying. ‘Get her other arm into it, Tibs. And stop your blubbering, girl, you’ve nothing to cry about. You should think yourself lucky the master hasn’t remembered who you are. Maybe he never did know or surely he would have flung you out as well. Biddy, don’t just stand there, turn the bed down and we’ll get Miss Augusta into it. She must have a fever, she’s shivering so much.’
The bed was lumpy and uncomfortable but Augusta was glad to be cocooned tightly between its sheets and blankets. The voices of the servants receded and approached nearer, faded and grew stronger, ebbed and flowed, she had no idea for how long. She thought she heard herself moan and cry out too, and she had vague sensations of hands holding her down and arms raising her up and something cool soothing her brow. But it was part of a strange hazy world that had no reality in time or place.
The Dark Side of Pleasure Page 6
