Quite early in our acquaintance, Thomas persuaded me and my mother that my brothers and sisters and myself should be inoculated against the smallpox, which was then a great trial to the whole country but particularly in the cities. A most terrible illness it was, killing vast numbers and scarring where it did not kill, particularly among the needy. It was no respecter of persons and the children of the gentry were as much at risk as any other, but it did seem to strike at those who were poor and ill fed, and who were living as we did, fairly crammed together in small, damp houses.
‘I’ll come to your house to carry out the procedure,’ he said. My mother was very dubious about the whole enterprise but finally allowed herself to be persuaded. She wanted to undergo the procedure too, out of a sense of loyalty to her children. We knew that it was a risky business, for all that Thomas tried to reassure us. There were tales of people who had contracted the disease itself from the preventative. But Thomas told my mother that there was no need for her to be inoculated. If she had not, so far, caught the disease, then she would in all likelihood not catch it now. He was right. It would be true to say that it was very largely a disease of the young, I suppose because those who survived possessed some property which must repel the sickness.
I remember her pacing up and down the kitchen the night before, saying, ‘If only your father were here. He would know what to do. He would know whether it was the right thing to do or no.’ Eventually her respect for Doctor Brown – and my persuasion – overrode her natural suspicion of anything new, and she trusted him enough to allow him to treat all her children, even wee Rab, who was her baby and her golden boy.
It was a great novelty for us at the time, although I think it is much in use nowadays and so may not be quite the strange experience that it was for us. On the day when Thomas came to do the procedure, he passed a few pleasantries with my mother and then assembled us in the kitchen. We must have been a strange sight, lined up with our arms bared, like participants in some secret ritual, with my mother hovering about, wringing her hands with anxiety on our behalf. He brought a packet out of his pocket and said that the matter, which would do the business, was in fine cotton thread therein.
He took a small bit of the thread, saturated with this matter, between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand and a lancet in his right hand. At the sight of the sharp instrument, Johnnie set up a great wailing.
‘Don’t be such a baby!’ said our mother, but she herself looked like to cry in sympathy and I saw her lip trembling.
‘Hush now, Johnnie Lang!’ said Thomas, quite sternly for him. ‘Are you not planning to be a big, brave sailor one day? And look at your sisters. They are not making such a dreadful noise. Will you be shamed by the bravery of a pair of lassies?’
Johnnie bit his lip at that and quietened down somewhat.
Thomas dipped the lancet in the cotton thread and, with the point of it, made two dots about two inches apart on the arm of each of us. It looked to me, for I watched him with interest, like a strange kind of needlework. He dipped the lancet in water and then in the cotton thread and onto our arms again.
James and Johnnie began to make a great fuss again, as the punctures were made, bawling and crying that it was ‘sair’ as was their wont. I think they were more feart than they let on, and fear always seems to increase pain, or so Thomas remarked quietly in my ear. Rab was stoical about the whole process, although he gave a little start when Thomas introduced the lancet into his arm, but he said stoutly that it was ‘not so bad after all’. The girls – following Bessie’s example, for she had come home to undergo the procedure – declared that it only tickled a bit and giggled and fidgeted with their feet. The lassies were right. It was a mild discomfort only, just at first. We were to stand there with our arms exposed to the cold air for about three minutes till the thing was almost dried up, and it was plain to see that, where the dots were, there was a red mark, growing vivid almost instantly, like the sting you get from a midge bite or a nettle.
Thomas’s advice was that we must eat meat at dinner if we could (a rare enough occurrence for us at any time) and then abstain from it for a little while after, which was no hardship to us for the same reason. He prescribed a powder of calamine for night time, and in the morning we were to take water gruel, as much as we could eat. The small irritation continued on our arms for some time, and the wee ones felt worse than we did, becoming hot and fractious for a spell, but that was the whole of it. Thomas said that we should be safe from the disease for some years afterwards, although the process might have to be repeated in due course.
My superstitious mother could not fathom how it came about and confessed to me afterwards that she thought it was a kind of magic. Thomas seemed very excited about the whole thing and I asked him to explain the process to me, for I did not think it could be magic.
‘Those who work in the countryside, most particularly dairymaids who spend much of their time among cows, almost never contract the smallpox,’ he said. ‘We believe they have somehow been exposed to some similar but less virulent illness among cattle, and – much like your Jenny with her bee stings I suppose – their bodies have grown familiar with the sickness and never seem to fall ill with it afterwards.’
‘But how did they discover the procedure? How did they find it out?’
‘Some doctors decided to take a little of the matter from the sores on the cows that were ill but seldom died of the disease, and introduce it into their own blood.’
‘Was that not dangerous?’
‘Oh very dangerous indeed, since they would have no idea of the effects. It was significant that they never took the smallpox either, and neither did any that they similarly inoculated. There is that in the blood which must learn to recognise the sickness in some way and reject it from making inroads into the body. That is as much as we know. But we are learning, William, we are learning all the time.’
Afterwards, we had few ill effects. My mother need not have worried. Rab ran a fever for some time, to be sure, but Thomas came back and bled him a little. He instructed my mother to sponge him down with tepid water, and he was soon quite well again.
* * *
This procedure, which we had great faith in, serves to explain why, when I took a severe chill in the rainy weather at the tail end of 1804, I had no fears that my illness might be the smallpox, and I was confident that I would soon shake it off. I believed myself to be a strong young man. At that age, you never consider any alternative. My father had had the weight of years on his back, but when you are in your twenties, you know that you are immortal and invincible, if ever you spare a moment to think about such things at all. During that winter of 1804 and right into January and February of 1805 I felt constantly unwell. The air rattled in my chest, and a horrible, dry cough woke me up five or six times in the night and saw me sitting bolt upright in the box bed with its high piled pillows, fighting for every breath.
My mother, thoroughly frightened by my pallor and shortness of breath, fussed over me, cooked beef broth for me and made me wear flannel next to my chest. I kept going for as long as I was able with all the work that needed to be done in preparation for the winter season in the garden. And then there was structural work to be undertaken, paths to be laid and walls to be built, as well as all kinds of pruning and cutting. I think she must have had my father and his death very strongly in her mind at that time. The garden might lie fallow over the winter, but that didn’t mean that there was any less work for the gardeners. I couldn’t shirk it, no matter how unwell I felt, although James told me to rest, he and the other lads would get on with things. I knew they were but haphazard workers when unsupervised and felt I had to be there as much as possible, to make sure they were doing exactly what I had told them.
The weather was cold and very wet. It is the constant rain that keeps the fields green throughout the whole year in these parts. But in the town, the rain clouds seemed to make the filth and fumes from the type foundry hang low in ragged, oily vapours. My breathing became even more painful, and each breath would set me off coughing all over again, as though the air itself was irritating my lungs. Which perhaps it was. I was more often than not soaked through to the skin by the time I got into the house at night and I never seemed able to rid myself of the ill effects. I would think I was getting well after a day or two’s rest, but then I would go out into the gardens and the next night would wake up shivering and sweating and coughing all over again. Everything was a trial to me. I thought sometimes that my legs would not hold me up for one instant longer. One cough would spawn an army. I would be racked with them, bent double, sucking in air and expelling it until my ribs ached.
Thomas had been away on family business for a few weeks. On his return, he missed me in the garden. I had not told him of my plight, or not the whole of it, keeping it from him out of a curious reluctance to admit to my own weakness. At last, he sought out James and asked what was wrong with me. Whenever I could contrive to visit her, Jenny would send me away with a jar of honey, and now Thomas sent a message with James, in which he advised me to take a little rum or whisky if I could get it, with the honey and some lemons. Whisky was available in the town, as was rum in plenty, but I could no more afford to buy lemons than I could afford to buy books. These fruits were very plentiful in Glasgow at that time, coming in on the vessels from foreign parts, and Thomas had all kinds of acquaintance aboard these ships, because sometimes he would acquire plant specimens from the captains, men whom he paid to find such things for him. But lemons were much too costly for me.
The gentlemen’s clubs of the town still make their Glasgow punch with rum from the Carolinas, brown sugar which is seldom in short supply and lemons. There is a way of making it, just so, with a sherbet compounded of sugar and lemons and water – the quality of the sherbet dictates the quality of the finished punch – and once made, you add rum to taste. I would never have deemed it a health-giving drink, and my mother had a positive aversion to spirits, but Thomas said that a type of this drink, made with Scots whisky, might do some good to my poor wheezing chest and even if it did no good whatsoever, it would make me feel better. Then, Thomas arrived at the door with a whole bag full of lemons.
‘Just what the doctor ordered, Mistress Lang,’ he told my mother, who seemed tongue-tied by the very sight of him, let alone his unexpected gift.
She viewed the bag of sweet-smelling lemons as some exotic fruit, which they were to her of course, as they were to all of us, and was inclined to use them one quarter slice at a time, in an effort to make them last. I was sitting in front of the fire with a woollen blanket wrapped around me. My teeth were chattering, my hands and feet were icy, though my head was hot, and I felt strange and otherwordly altogether. Thomas saw me and seemed very concerned. I remember his sharp intake of breath, the way he practically ran across the room. He sat down beside me and put one hand on my forehead and then took hold of my wrist with the other. He said he was counting my heartbeats and that I was much too hot and the pulse, as he called it, was rather fast. There was some comfort in the touch of his hand and I found, to my immense shame, that I didn’t want him to let go. I felt like a wean and, in my debilitated state, I wanted only to close my eyes, lean up against him and go to sleep, secure in his warm presence, as I had done in that feather bed, on the Isle of Arran.
I think my mother would have been horrified to see me so familiar with a man she considered to be the gentry. As it was, I felt the shameful tears prickling at the back of my eyes. My throat was swelling up with them too, and I turned away lest he should see my weakness. Well, I’m sure he did see my weakness, for when I looked back, he was gazing at me steadily with a mixture of compassion and concern. He moved to crouch a little in front of me, so that my mother could not see. His fingers moved down from my wrist to my hand, and he squeezed it once, very firmly, which brought the tears to my eyes all over again, and then he let go.
‘Ah, William!’ he said. ‘My poor William. You should have sent for me before this!’
He tucked the blanket more closely around me and told my mother to mix the lemons up with honey and some whisky, which he had brought with him in a silver flask. He supervised the task, tut-tutted at the way she was scrimping with the lemons, made her cut them in halves and squeeze them generously into the drink. Then he told her to mix an equally generous quantity of honey with the lemon juice.
‘Don’t skimp, don’t skimp,’ he said. ‘Mistress Jenny Caddas is not short of honey, I’m thinking!’
He watched while she heated it over the fire and then he added a large measure of whisky with his own hand and brought it over to me in a cup.
‘Drink it slowly,’ he said. ‘But drink all of it.’
I did as I was told. I would have drunk whatever he put into my hand at that moment. He could have prescribed poison for me, and I would have taken it gladly.
Because of the inoculation, I did not fear the smallpox, but I was terrified that I might start coughing blood, which would have been a sure sign of consumption or something equally fatal. We had seen whole families fall victim to the disease and drop off the bough, one after another. One of the old gardeners had buried seven children and his wife as well, although he himself had survived unscathed in body, if not in mind.
I seemed constantly debilitated and yet there was no respite from the work, and I worried that I was neglecting the gardens and that complaints would surely be made against me. Thomas said I was not to worry, but was just to think about getting well again. If there were any complaints he would write to Faculty on my behalf and all would be well. And I believed him. I trusted him completely. Why would I not? He had given me no reason to do otherwise.
Whether it was the whisky toddy or some other medicine that Thomas prescribed for me, or what my mother called his ‘healing hands’, by the time the milder spring weather came in, I was beginning to feel stronger and more myself.
After the gift of lemons she became quite besotted by him, although such things as inoculation had never inspired a similar admiration.
‘You look a little better,’ said Thomas, when next he visited. ‘I confess I’ve been worried about you. But the sooner you can go out into the countryside again and get away from this wretched city for a few hours, the better it will be for your health.’
He was right of course, although I still had some misgivings about the amount of extra work involved in gathering samples for him. I had been head gardener for some four years, and was beginning to feel very comfortable with the job, was beginning to feel that I knew what I was doing. But all the same, I realised that complaints were still being made about the state of the gardens and the fault was deemed to be mine and mine alone.