When spring came round, and when the new planting was done, Thomas again asked me if I might find the time to go out and about into the surrounding countryside and gather specimens for the students.
‘I know how busy you are, William,’ he told me. ‘But it would be such a favour to me, if you could oblige me in this. And there is nobody I would trust quite as much as yourself in this matter.’
The truth was that I had no free time whatsoever for such a venture and no business to be doing it. Between the garden and the apothecary business, which was already failing, indeed which could never truly be said to have got started, I needed all the time I had for myself and my work. But I could not bring myself to deny him. He was that kind of man, so generous, so persuasive, that you wanted to please him. And besides, I think I wanted to do it for myself. There was that about it that satisfied something in me, something over and beyond the daily grind of digging and hoeing, of weeding and pruning. It was a pleasure of the mind as well as the body: to be entrusted with seeking out certain plants, to be using all my skills to find them and, once found, to preserve them for him. But he surprised me even more by his next suggestion.
‘Why don’t you come to my lectures?’ he asked.
‘How could I attend your lectures, sir? A common gardener.’
I could not get out of the habit of calling him ‘sir’ no matter how hard I tried.
‘Oh, I think you’re a very uncommon gardener, William. But why not? I think you might find them interesting.’
I could think of a dozen reasons why not, most of them to do with money or the lack of it. ‘Sir, your students must pay and I could not afford to pay you!’
‘Well, perhaps we could come to some arrangement. You supply me with botanical specimens and I’ll be happy to waive my lecture fees. Would that persuade you? It seems fair enough to me!’
I told him that I would think about it and I did think about it, perhaps more than was good for me. I was so hungry for knowledge at that time and the learning he offered me gleamed in my mind’s eye, enticing me like some exotic fruit.
* * *
That spring and summer, my mother pottered about with a small quantity of withered herbs, trying, like Whuppity Stoorie in the tale which my grand-daughter loves, to spin them into gold, but with far less success than that legendary fairy woman. Meanwhile, I would walk for miles in the sweet countryside outside the town, taking my leather bag and my squares of damp linen with me, and I would collect plants in great quantity, all that Thomas asked for and more: angelica, aromatic and tender in the spring, dog violets and windflowers, campion and ramsons. There were young nettles with many medicinal properties, not least the virtue of purifying the blood, followed by foxgloves in high summer, marching armies of them, poisonous and beautiful, although Thomas told me they had some medicinal uses. I harvested pink and white yarrow and cuttings of the sweet honeysuckle that grew, a buttery tangle in all the hedgerows. I gathered chickweed, scurvy grass, thistle and valerian, nightshade and wormwood, feverfew and sweet cicely and calendula. The names were poetry to me, an incantation on my tongue, a worship more potent than any prayer intoned by the minister in the kirk.
Then I would bring them back and present them to Thomas. I would hand them to him as my grand-daughter brings me the treasures she finds in the garden, the chuckie stanes and feathers that she sometimes gives me, and I would bask in the enjoyment of his gratitude, much as she is certain of pleasing me, whatever she brings. And if that sounds plain daft to you, I can’t help it. One smile, one nod of his head, was enough to make my day.
All the same, there were times when Thomas would be distracted. He would be talking to me about botanical specimens or even enquiring after my family and he would be interrupted by some passing professor or scholar with a pressing question. His gaze would slide away. ‘One minute, William,’ he would say and turn aside from me. I cannot even now tell you why I would feel so unreasonably bereft, angry even, unless it was a premonition of things to come. There was nothing in it. And yet I would be suddenly chilled, as when the sun goes behind a cloud in the middle of a warm day. Perhaps it was simply that I found our conversations so precious. Interruptions were terrible to me. I was always hanging on his words, like poor Lothian Tam on Lunardi’s balloon. And when he withdrew, I would find myself plummeting to earth. I would pick myself up, and tell him that I had better get on with the work I was being paid to do. He could see that I was not best pleased and I think it irritated him but he always contrived to leave me with a smile.
I’ll not deny, a large part of the pleasure I took in it sprang from his gratitude. The warmth of the man. The way he would shake my hand like a friend. He was only a few years older than me, but he was born to quite different things and I was young enough to believe in heroes. His students were right. When I could spare the time to attend his classes – not half as often as I would have liked – I found that he was an exceedingly good teacher, lively, knowledgeable and generous. He treated me no differently from the way he treated the other students, even though they would cast scornful glances at me and make unkind remarks. In fact, I would have said that he treated me with even more warmth. He was, at that time, a god in my eyes. I would have gathered more than prickly whins and nettles to please him. I think I would have gone deep into the underworld for him at that time, a surrogate Orpheus in pursuit of his Eurydice.
* * *
As far as I remember, the day that I first met Jenny Caddas was the same day that he gave me the book, although I know that memories can be deceptive. They sometimes slide together and no two people will have the same remembrance of the same event, each one convinced that he is right. But the two events are conjoined in my mind. It is the same book that lies before me now, on my desk, the book that came to stand for all that we shared. I was tired and footsore on that day, and later than I had intended because I had lingered longer than I should have at Jenny’s house. I had arranged to meet Thomas in the college garden but he was nowhere to be seen, and I thought he might have given up on me and gone home to his house in the town, so I sat down on a stone bench, opened my leather bag and began to unwrap the plants, making sure that I had all that were required and that none had suffered too much on the way back to town. I became so engrossed in the task that I never heard him as he came along the path in the dusk.
He threw himself onto the bench beside me. ‘You’ve got them all?’
‘Aye, most o’ them.’
‘I knew I could rely on you,’ he said.
I stretched out my legs. I was tired, but only in the way you are when it’s almost a pleasure to you: not real exhaustion, so much as the kind of weariness that induces sound sleep. ‘I’ve foraged three miles and more from the town and walked three or four times that much.’
‘I know it’s demanding, William.’
‘No’ just walked either. I’ve been chased by dogs with sharp teeth and lads with stones and an auld wifie with a ladle and she was much the worst of the three!’
It was true enough. People in the countryside, especially so close to the city, were suspicious of strangers, seeing robbers and vagabonds everywhere. And perhaps with good reason for we lived in lawless times and still do. The dogs that guarded the cottages were prone to nipping at your heels on sound preventative principles and even the young lads who were marauding through the fields, meant to be tending to the crops and scaring the birds, would toss a stone or even a boulder at you as soon as look at you. But the old women were by far the worst and even if you were to stop and ask for directions or a drink, they would likely hunt you from their doors with whatever was to hand, be it a besom or a garden rake. Jenny had been unusual in being so friendly, but I flattered myself that maybe she had liked the look of me and that was the reason why she had – against her better judgement – allowed me to help her and invited me into her house.
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Thomas. But he looked amused rather than genuinely apologetic. He brought out his flask and offered me a drink again. It had become something of a habit between us, and my reward for all my efforts on his behalf.
‘Have you ever tried it?’ I asked him.
‘Tried what?’
‘The distillation.’
He shook his head. ‘No, no. I haven’t. Don’t put ideas into my head.’
‘You’d have the knowledge right enough. As a medical man!’
‘I would. But I don’t have the time. And I’d rather not fall foul of the exciseman.’
‘Ah weel, it would be one way …’
‘One way of what?’
‘Of getting some siller.’
He frowned. He didn’t have to ask why I needed siller. He knew.
‘It is going badly. You would hardly credit how badly.’
‘Oh, I think I would.’ He sounded sad rather than angry.
‘Disastrously’ would have been a better word. My mother could hardly stir herself to tend to the shop after she had seen to the needs of the younger children. There was money owed to the moneylender. Even now, with high summer approaching, there were not enough herbs and plants to supply the shop and the botanical lectures. Not in the physic garden and not even with what I gathered for Thomas. He could use all that I could fetch him and more. Why had I ever started on such a venture?
My only excuse had been my desperation about money when I had been unsure as to whether I would win the gardener’s position. And my mother had merely done as she was told, submitting to the will of a young man, too daft to know better, submitting because she was still smitten by grief. If my father had been alive and had suggested such a thing she would have persuaded him otherwise. But then he was a sensible man, and he would never have suggested such a thing, nor permitted me to indulge in it. He knew his own limitations and mine.
‘Do you not have enough to do with your time, what with the garden and all these?’ Thomas gestured at the plants. ‘I doubt if you could keep up to this and your apothecary venture and attend lectures as well.’
‘I cannot keep up to them. That’s the problem. And my mother is no hand with the herbs.’
I wondered later if he was worried about me or worried that I would not be able to gather specimens for him. But to give the man his due, I think he was already aware of the difficulties and was trying to find a way to help me.
‘It is not an easy trade, you know,’ he told me. ‘Even for those who are born to it. It is not just a question of plants, but of scholarship. It tends to run in families, with folk passing the learning down from one to another over the years. And often it is the women who are the keepers of such knowledge. Folk talk of auld wives’ tales, but the auld wives can be repositories of profound learning and should not be dismissed out of hand. Or so I have always thought.’
‘I thought my mother would learn. And I hoped that my young sisters would help her.’
‘Your foolish sisters?’ He glanced over at me with a smile that was both rueful and foxy, making me smile too. ‘When you have told me that it is a moot point which is the more lazy of the two, Susanna or Jean?’
‘It was stupid of me.’
‘Not stupid. I would never call you stupid. But over-optimistic maybe.’
‘It’s what the old gardener before my father did, you know. He and his wife took a shop and his wife made all kinds of remedies with the spare herbs from the gardens. It was a very successful venture I believe.’
‘Aye but that was maybe back in the days when the physic garden was in a better state than it is now. And perhaps his wife already had the skills.’
‘She had.’
‘It worries me that you are tied into such a venture. I wonder if there is anything that I can do to help you.’
‘I doubt it. You may be a fine botanist and a better physician, Doctor Brown, but I cannot see you making distillations and medications for me, and I fear my mother will never learn to do it.’
I had hoped that the apothecary business might be a way of adding to our meagre income over the summer, so that we could survive enough winters for the lads to be sufficiently grown to earn money on their own account. For Rab to grow strong and healthy. For wee Rab – as I thought of it in my darker moments when I lay awake, turning things over and over in my mind – to survive.
The moneylender had come to our door, asking if there was anything he could do for us, sniffing out the needy like all such parasites who prey on the poor. I had taken the money, and had negotiated with the owner of one of the properties adjacent to the university for the use of his front room as a shop. But, more often than not these days, it sat empty and dusty, while my poor mother found one excuse after another not to be there. And I could not do it for her. There were not enough hours in the day for me to do it.
Even when she was there, she did little more than footer about the place, boiling up evil-smelling potions that fermented in their bottles and occasionally exploded, sending shards of glass and foul smells everywhere. Nobody would ever pay her money for these things and I would have been afraid to sell them lest the cure prove infinitely worse than the disease and ultimately kill somebody.
The best thing she ever made was a variety of ale from the tips of the young nettles, and, later in the year, a sparkling beverage conjured from the creamy elderflowers that were everywhere to be found, the elder being a most prolific tree at seeding itself in this part of the world. Both of these were palatable and could – I suppose – be deemed to be health giving. But this was plain cookery, kitchen brewing rather than medicine and she felt herself on surer ground, as she also did when adding the green shoots of ramsons, with their strong flavour, to white cheese, making a delicious concoction that had been a favourite with my father.
Thomas had offered to pay me extra for my excursions into the countryside on his behalf but I was reluctant to take anything from him and he knew it. I think it was why he had suggested I attend his lectures. I was afraid of spoiling our friendship. We never felt like servant and master, but I had an inkling that if I allowed him to pay me, it would subtly alter something between us. Maybe I was wrong. Now that I have been in business for so many years, I can see that it is possible to have a good financial relationship with a man and yet be on friendly terms. But back then, it seemed that we were negotiating some precarious pathway, feeling our way into a friendship that was rare for both of us, and I wanted to do nothing to upset the balance between us.