I love spring best of all the seasons, but who does not? Even now, when I am in the winter of my years, spring brings a lifting of the heart, a return of the sense that anything is possible. Fluffy willow catkins and hazel lambstails appear as if out of nowhere, even in the town gardens. Back then, when I was working at the college, I would give my brother James and the other under-gardeners enough work to last the day and take myself off with my collecting bag on my back. Without the encumbrance of the apothecary business to worry about, my mother was much more cheerful. With my worries about her eased, I thought that I would be able to organise my gardening and my collecting duties more efficiently.
As soon as I had gathered what I thought was a fair number of specimens, I would contrive to drop by Jenny’s door, preferably at those times when Sandy Caddas would be away from home. She used to wait for me at the side window from which she had a pretty good view of the path to the house. I’m sure she took pleasure from my visits. She would feed me freshly baked cakes or oaties and soft cheese, and mugs of her father’s ale, and sometimes she would let me steal a kiss or two when there was nobody to see. One week slid into another and I was blissfully happy. I must have been, because time passed so quickly and the blue, white and pale lemon of spring flowers imperceptibly gave way to the more vibrant colours of summer. Then I would find her gathering bundles of the lavender she grew in the cottage garden, and hanging them up to dry.
‘I’ll take some of them into the town and sell them just as they are,’ she said. ‘But some of them will have to be rubbed and the flower heads stored. So you can make yourself useful!’
I helped her to do it and it was a pleasant, highly scented task. Then, Jenny and her sister would take the lavender and stitch it into muslin bags which could be placed among linens to keep the moths away. Some of these she would use at home and some would be taken into town with the bunches of lavender to be sold there. Lavender has many useful properties and she said that deterring moths was the least of them. Some of it she would make into lavender water.
‘It’s a very good remedy for a headache and if you sprinkle a few drops on your pillow you’ll sleep soundly and your dreams will be pleasant. Take some for your mother!’ she would urge me. She was a generous lass, wanting to share all that she had in the way of remedies and knowledge.
‘How come you know these things?’ I asked her, a little indignant that a lass should have a head so stuffed with things of which I was quite ignorant.
‘I had them from my mother,’ she said.
‘But you said she died while you were young.’
‘Aye, but I was a quick learner! Besides, she would make it all into a kind of game, so it was a pleasure, even though I was but a child. And she wrote some of it down for me.’
We have them still, those receipts. I could lay hands on them if I wanted to, hardly a book at all really, but a sheaf of papers for this and that remedy, most of them scrawled on precious scraps of paper, covering every surface, the spelling erratic, the directions cryptic.
Besides lavender, Jenny would grow pot marigolds in her garden, like so many miniature suns, shining among the other flowers. These have always been a favourite with me and she shared my affection for them. They have a lovely, peppery scent but she told me they had other valuable properties. She would make an ointment out of the petals and it was said to be very good for cuts and grazes and suchlike injuries. She gave me a pot of it to take home with me, and I used it whenever I cut my fingers in the garden, which was pretty often, and she was right. It was wonderfully effective for preventing infection.
Thomas saw me using it one day, after I had torn my hand on a rose bush. I am very fond of roses and always have been, most particularly the little wild rose of Scotland that scrambles among the walls and hedges of this country, deceptively delicate but resilient where other plants will fail. They always remind me of Jenny, with her light hair. They are lovely but, quite unlike Jenny who would not willingly have harmed anyone, they are malicious plants. They seem to wait until you turn your back on them and then they pounce on you, no matter how hard you try to avoid them. I was more cut about with roses than with anything else, even nettles, in my whole career as a gardener.
‘What’s that?’ Thomas asked when he saw me applying Jenny’s marigold ointment to the latest crop of punctures and grazes. I explained that it was something my friend had made for me, and he asked if I might procure a pot or two for him, since I obviously thought it efficacious, and he would try it as an experiment on his patients. He offered to pay for it, so I got Jenny to make a few pots for him. He came back to me for more, as much as she could supply, because he said it was extremely effective. Jenny and I joked that in due course, we might be able to resurrect the apothecary idea, with a little help from Thomas. Because this was a real skill she had and, as Thomas said, there was always a call for simple remedies that worked, especially for sailors and the like who might have no recourse to more complicated medicines during their long voyages.
‘One day,’ she told me, ‘One day we’ll maybe go into business for ourselves.’
‘Do you think so?’ I would have been reluctant, all the same, having tried and failed so comprehensively.
‘Well, I think I would have the skills, especially with you to help me. But we would have to find another, better garden than your physic garden to supply us with plants. We’d have to grow things ourselves. Have a ready supply of the right herbs.’
I remembered my father’s predecessor, and how successful he and his wife had been in similar circumstances, and it didn’t seem too fanciful to think that one day Jenny and I might manage it. The unspoken assumption in all this, of course, was that we would always be together. We skirted around the idea all the time, cautiously, both aware of what a momentous commitment that might be, aware too that neither of us had the necessary resources. But I was young and strong and full of hope for the future.
* * *
She had not met Thomas at that time, but she had heard about him, because I spoke about him often. In fact, I think I spoke about him rather too much for her liking.
‘Thomas, Thomas,’ she said. ‘I hear this Doctor Thomas Brown mentioned on all sides! Is he the fount of all knowledge? Can he truly be right about everything, William?’
She was laughing as she said it, but there was a germ of truth at the heart of her complaint. I did defer to Thomas on most occasions and about most things. Over the years, I have noticed that this is a fault of men more than women. We think our heroes can do no wrong, while clear-eyed women seem able to love theirs in spite of their faults. If he told me something, I believed him. If he advised me to do something, I usually found myself obeying. And yet it was not in my nature to conform. But at that time, I think if he had told me black was really white, I would have agreed.
When my Jenny wasn’t working with her plants or in the garden, she was usually to be found stitching away at her silk or her muslin. She had it in a circular wooden tambour to keep it straight and whenever one of these broke I would contrive to make another for her out of a hazel wand. The needles she used were very fine and the thread too was so fine that it was a tricky task to thread the needles. She would give Anna, her wee sister, a penny to rub beeswax on it, and coax it through the eyes, keeping several needles threaded at once to save time. When the weather and the season allowed, she would sit outside the door on a boulder, deliberately rolled there for the purpose, and she would stitch away in the sunlight. She said it was hard on the eyes otherwise, and in any case it was hard on her neck and shoulders, always bending over like that, staring at the tiny flowers and sprigs she was creating, like an artist with his brush.
I can bring her before my eyes yet, the curve of her neck, the fragility of it as she bent over, and the curls where she caught up her hair, coiling it onto her head to keep it out of her eyes. She had shapely arms and surprisingly sturdy hands with stubby nails, hands which could achieve miracles. The work was exquisite. I have never seen anything like it before or since. You would have sworn it was fine lace, but it wasn’t; it was embroidery. And at the centre of the flowers were even smaller centres, each with its own design, a minute cobweb of threads as though some tiny spider had been hard at work there. Some of the work would be made up into lappets for ladies. Sometimes it might go for baby gowns, for the infants of the rich, who liked their children to appear as fashionable as themselves.
This was not, you must understand, the Ayrshire needlework currently very much in vogue and advertised in all our newspapers, especially here in Glasgow, but an older design, albeit very similar, the same that was brought by Mr Ruffini to Edinburgh from his native Italy. For that reason alone, I think Jenny could command a high price for her work. There was so little of it to be found here in the west at that time. This explained why she devoted so much of her time to it, and her father encouraged her. He liked to see her working out in the garden, taking the fresh air and sunlight as well. His philosophy was that, ‘folk aye need claithes’, by which he meant that the work of the weavers would never disappear. I don’t think he foresaw the advent of the enormous weaving machines that would supersede his cottage industry within a generation, driving the weavers from their own homes where they were kings, controlling their work as they chose, and into the hands of the factory owners who regulated the lives of their workers in every particular. Or if he did foresee it, he dismissed it as an impossibility. Nobody, he thought, would be able to reproduce the quality of the work done by a weaver, labouring diligently under his own instructions. And perhaps he was right. But that is, I’ll allow, quite another story.
* * *
Once or twice, Jenny would rush out and intercept me and tell me that her father was in the weaving shop from which he might emerge at any moment, and we had better not be seen together in the house. Then we would walk a little way away and sit among the trees, just talking, just passing the time of day with daffing and laughing the way lads and lassies do and have done since time began. Once or twice she let me take her hand. When I kissed her, it was very cautiously because it was such a new thing for me to kiss a lassie. Her lips were dry and warm. The touch of them made me feel strange. I had the clean scent of her breath in my nostrils, honey, which I think she had been eating, and something else that made my heart pound and my ears sing. Then I looked up and saw her sister standing watching us, with her doll clutched in one hand and her thumb in her mouth. She had grown somewhat since that first day when Jenny had taken the swarm and she had looked on. She was watching, aye watching us, her eyes large and dark, hazel eyes, nothing like her sister’s bright blue. Jenny looked around and saw her too. She rose up swiftly and flew over to her.
‘You don’t say aethin’ aboot this! D’you hear me now? If you say aethin’ at a” – she cast about her for a sufficiently horrible threat – ‘I’ll tak’ Maisie,’ (for that was the name of the wee rag doll) ‘I’ll tak’ Maisie and put her at the back of the fire. There now!’
I thought the child would greet but she did nothing of the sort. She tucked Maisie safely under her arm, stuck out her tongue at her sister, turned around and flounced off down the path. I don’t think she believed a word of the threat but the gravity of the situation must have struck her forcibly, for as far as I know, she didn’t tell.
Gilbert was a different matter. Gilbert was the boy who worked for Sandy Caddas and I think right from the start he disliked me. I don’t know whether it was because, young as he was, he was over-fond of Jenny or because he sensed my dislike of him. He was twelve, a scrawny, undersized lad who lived nearby with his mother and came to work for Sandy every day. He looked ill fed, and sometimes there were bruises on his face and his arms and shins. I knew Sandy treated him well enough so could only assume that his mother, or perhaps her man, who was Gilbert’s stepfather, was not above giving him a beating or a kicking. I didn’t enquire too closely. In fact, I ignored him as far as was possible. I’ll allow I didn’t like him much. I know I should have felt sorry for him. I was sorry. But he irritated me. He sniffed constantly, his face was covered in raw blemishes and he had a way of grinning, like a dog will grin at you with curled lips, to avert a beating. He was very polite to me, to my face, calling me Mr Lang, but there was an edge to the way he said the words, and I thought that if he could do me an ill turn, he probably would. I found him repellent. Jenny was always kind to him, and perhaps that too disposed me to dislike him. But she had a deal of sympathy for him, defending him more often than not. Sandy Caddas kept him very busy and we seldom had more than a glimpse of him, trailing after his master, or working with him at the loom and being roundly – albeit only verbally – abused when he got the threads in a fankle.